It behaved like a hunger, and hungers do not end when they are fed; they only quiet for a while and return.

I had begun to suspect that even if we had our boy, the relief would not last, that some new insufficiency would rise up to take its place, because the emptiness Nicolas was trying to fill with a son had never actually been about a son at all.

It was about him — some wound of his own, some place where he did not feel like enough, that he had decided a boy who looked like him would finally heal.

And you cannot heal a wound like that by having a child.

You can only hand the child the job of healing it, and set him up to fail at a task no infant was ever meant to carry.

I did not have the words for all of this yet, in that fourth year.