Beside it went her first photograph, a pair of tiny socks, and the card Renata had written the day she was born.

I wanted my daughter’s memories to belong to her, not to the people who had hurt us before she arrived.

One morning, Josephine crawled across the living-room rug toward a patch of sunlight and laughed at the dust drifting in the beam.

I sat on the floor watching her and realized that I had gone an entire afternoon without thinking about the yard.

It was not forgetting.