The quiet craftsman house came apart at the seams with noise.

Silas was in the backyard within the hour, adding a level to the treehouse with the boys.

Ruby and Hazel took over the kitchen with the girls and turned out a truly heroic quantity of cookies, and somewhere in there, out came a shoebox of old photographs — pictures our mother had taken that Hazel’s adoptive family had kept safe all these years, faces I had ached to see for two decades, handed across a flour-dusted counter like they were nothing, like they’d been waiting the whole time.

That night, when the kids had finally gone down in their oak beds, the four of us sat out by the fire pit under a hard bright field of stars.