Nora’s chin did something and she got it under control, which she should not have to be able to do at seven, and which she learned from watching me at a dinner table.

“Are you going to do it again?”

“I’m going to try not to. I’m probably going to be bad at it. You’re allowed to tell me when I am.”

She went and got Theo.

That was her idea, not mine, and it was the correct one. My son sat on the arm of the couch and listened to about ninety seconds of it and then said, “I don’t want to know any more right now,” and went outside, and has asked me exactly two questions in the fourteen months since.

Nora has asked me two hundred.