The rest of it swam and ran together, and I sat at my kitchen table with a piece of paper in my hand and cried the way you cry when something you gave up on turns out to have been coming toward you the whole time.

Chapter 14 — The Blue Sedan

Two weeks later, on a warm Saturday, a dusty blue sedan turned in off the road and came slowly up my long gravel drive.

Those two weeks were their own strange country.

We’d spoken on the phone — the four of us, a conference call arranged by a caseworker, four adult voices gone shy and careful with each other after a lifetime apart, not knowing whether to start with the enormous thing or the small ones, ending up somewhere in between.

I’d told the kids, of course.