She stroked his fine dark hair, her tiny, tiny boy. And she was filled with guilt, base-level guilt over the fact that this impossibly small person was so attuned to her moods, conversant not only in English and beginner Spanish but also in the peaks and valleys of his mother’s vacillating emotional state; she’d sworn since before he was born that she would never make him worry about her the way she always worried about her own parents, but it had happened anyway; she had let it happen anyway.
