“My parents are over the moon.

Somebody to carry on the Cortland name, at last.”

And there it was — at last — the two small words that told the truth about twelve years.

Two words.

He said them the way a man announces good news he assumes everyone shares, and I heard in them the entire architecture of a marriage. At last meant that everything before this — the wedding, the honeymoon, the two births, the twelve years, the daughters — had been a kind of waiting.

A waiting room.