I want to build the family that I wish I had. I want to go home to an actual home, not a cruddy apartment where my footsteps echo off the walls, and not the home in Kansas whose memory even feels oppressive. I want to rub my wife’s pregnant belly, to rub her feet, to run out and get her whatever she’s craving, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. The most impossibly impossible part of this imaginary scenario is that I want all these things with Harper. Only Harper. And I don’t know what it would take to get her to envision the same future with me.
