He watched her go with an expression I knew, because I wore it myself — the watchful tenderness of an adult who has learned how fragile a child’s world can be, and how fiercely it must be protected.

We had both learned it the same way, in the same week, from the same small source.

There is a kind of knowledge about children that you cannot get from loving them in easy times; you only get it from the moment you realize how exposed they are, how much passes over their heads and how much, terribly, does not.

Jim and I both carried that knowledge now, and it made us gentler with Lily, and gentler, I noticed, with each other.