That is the part I can hardly bear to write.

Children are not fooled by a family’s official story; they read the weather in a house the way sailors read a sky.

My girls knew, in some wordless way, that the household was oriented toward a person who had not yet arrived — that there was a room being saved and a name being carried and a hope being nursed that was not about any of them.

Leandra, my oldest, once asked me, not sadly, just curiously, whether Daddy would love a baby brother more than her.

I said no, of course not, don’t be silly.

But she had not invented the question.