“No, I mean — I want you to actually hear it. I drove past police stations. I drove past a hospital. It wasn’t that you were the last option.” She pulled back.

“You were the only one I got to choose. Everything else in my whole life happened to me. You’re the one thing I picked.”

The house is quiet again. It is a different quiet; I don’t know how else to put it. The clock still marks the hours, and I still hear it, and it no longer sounds like an accounting.

Thursdays they come for dinner. Sundays I go there, which is better, because a person should be a guest sometimes.

Ava is two and a half now and calls me Gam, which was her invention and which I have decided is permanent.

The blanket lives in her bed. It has needed three more repairs; I did two of them and Sabrina did one, badly, with the wrong yarn, and we have agreed not to fix her fixing.