We stayed like that for a while, in the sunlit room, my daughter in my arms and her brothers and sister playing around us, and I thought about how strange it was that a story that had begun with so much loss — a husband, a sister, a family, a child — had arrived, in the end, at this: a smaller, truer, safer life, four children and a mother, in a home that belonged entirely to us, where no one was pretending, and no one was hiding, and no child had to carry a weight that wasn’t hers.

I had not chosen any of the losses.

But I had chosen this, deliberately, out of the wreckage — chosen to build a place where my children could simply be children, and where the one who had grown up too fast could, at last, grow back down into her own age.

Kelly pulled back from the hug after a moment, and looked at me, and then, without another word, turned and went back to her brother and his crooked Lego tower, and started arguing with him again about the colors, entirely absorbed, entirely ordinary, entirely nine.

I watched her go.

And I understood that we were going to be all right — not because the hard year had not happened, but because we had come through it, together, into a life that was finally, quietly, and after everything we had lost and everything we had survived, unmistakably free.