Lily looked at me and said, Well, you grew up in a crowded house with lots of siblings, and you wanted to have kids, didn’t you? And it was a lot more complicated for you! I grinned, thinking of how it had all begun and how far we’d come: her shy request, when she’d first started thinking of having a child, whether I might want to be some kind of father figure to the baby; how nervous I’d been at first and yet how mesmerized, too, once Peter was born, how increasingly reluctant I’d grown to return to Manhattan after a few days visiting with them in New Jersey; the gradual easing, over months
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