And I was so happy.

I want that written down before anything else, because everything I’m about to describe came afterward, and if I lead with the difficulty I’ll have lied about that winter.

I woke at six because a baby woke at six. I made two breakfasts. There were shoes by my door that were not mine. My house — which for eleven years had made exactly one sound after dark, which was a clock — had a radio in it, and running water at odd hours, and a young woman singing badly in my shower.

Helen came over in December and stood in my kitchen and said, “Margaret. You look about forty.”

I was fifty-six years old and I had been given back a daughter and a granddaughter in the same eleven days, and I want to say plainly: that was real. That happened.

Nothing that came after unhappened it.