“Nothing. Just that life has a very strange sense of humor.”
“Thank God for that,” he said.
My children reacted exactly like grown children do when they discover their mother is still fully a woman: surprise, protectiveness, and a little outrage. But they met Robert, and he won them over.
Then, slowly, something else unexpected happened. Emily met Chloe. Then Ryan. At first it was painful and awkward, but the girl herself was innocent and impossible not to see that way forever. Blood is stubborn. It finds connections morality never would have chosen.
When Thomas suffered a heart attack months later, we all ended up in the hospital waiting room together—Emily, Ryan, Vanessa, Chloe, and me. That was when the abstract girl became real in the flesh. Tall, nervous, dark-eyed. Emily hugged her first. Ryan took longer. I looked at her and said, “Don’t call me ma’am. It makes me feel eighty.” She smiled, and somehow so did I.