When she managed five steps, he cheered.

When she managed a full sentence, he beamed as though she’d delivered a closing argument.

And she understood that the two of them were, in a sense, healing the same wound from opposite sides — she relearning how to be a person in the world, he relearning how to be a child in it, each of them coaxing the other back from a place no one their age should have had to go.

The rehab was the hardest thing she had ever done.

It was also, strangely, the closest she and her son had ever been, because for the first time in his life she was not managing a case or a crisis or a firm.

She was simply, wholly, his.