“Good,” he said, and went back down the hallway.
She held the sticker in her palm and looked at Daniel, who was watching his son disappear around the corner with an expression she recognized from somewhere deep in her own history — the expression of a parent who cannot quite believe the person they made.
“I don’t know how to be your son,” he said.
“You already are,” she said.
They stood in the kitchen in the quiet that follows the kind of day that rearranges everything, and she understood that the work of becoming — of building a relationship from the material of who they each were now, rather than who they had been to each other when he was seven and she was thirty — was going to take a long time and was going to require things from both of them that neither of them could fully anticipate.
She was fifty years old. Her life had been divided into Before Daniel and After Daniel for twenty years.
