I rolled over, and I pulled Chloe closer into the warm dark, and I went back to sleep.

I woke on my own at eight forty.

I cannot fully explain what those extra two hours of sleep were, or why they mattered as much as they did, except to say that they were the first thing I had taken for myself in five years, and my body received them like water.

For five years that six o’clock alarm had not been a time; it had been a role, the daily reveille of a life organized entirely around other people’s mornings — their breakfasts, their uniforms, their backpacks, their schedules — with my own needs slotted into whatever minutes were left over, which was usually none.

I had stopped even noticing that I was tired, the way you stop noticing a sound that never stops.