Six steps across a living room rug, a sleeping newborn passing from her aunt’s arms into her mother’s — a baby moving, at last, into the one place in the entire world she had, from her first breath, belonged.

Lauren’s arms closed around her, and she pulled her daughter in tight against her heart, and she bent her head and pressed her lips to the top of that tiny head, and she began to weep — not the shattered weeping of three days ago, but something else, something with healing already folded inside it.

Grace was home.

Not in a nursery, not in a house, but home, in her mother’s arms, exactly where she had always been meant to be.

I have thought many times about those six steps across the living room, because they taught me something about the word home that I had never quite understood before, despite having a home of my own and having spent nine months preparing one for Grace.