For the first two days, I concentrated on making the house livable.
I bought groceries, washed the sheets, and set up the little room that had once been my mother’s sewing room as a nursery.
I did not decorate it with the kind of perfect, expensive things Alexander would have chosen.
I found a secondhand wooden cradle and sanded its worn edges by hand.
The work was slow, but it gave my thoughts somewhere to go.
Whenever I felt the baby move, I stopped and rested my palm against my belly.
“Your grandmother would have loved you,” I whispered one afternoon.
The words broke something open in me.
I sat down on the nursery floor and cried until the baby nudged me again, as if reminding me I was not entirely alone.
Daniel came by the following day with papers and a folder of practical forms.
He took off his coat and sat at the kitchen table, careful not to crowd me with his questions.
