The children came to Washington for spring break that year and something happened that I was not prepared for.
James was eight and tall for his age and had developed the habit of asking every adult he met a structural question about their environment. He had been doing this for a year and it was equal parts charming and exhausting. The Senate building question was about whether the dome was load-bearing, which a Senate maintenance worker answered with such enthusiasm that James came back to me with six pages of notes.
But it was Nora who did the unexpected thing.
She was eight too, which everyone always had to remember because they moved through the world so differently that you could forget they were minutes apart in arrival. Nora had been quietly reading every piece of paper she could
