SATURDAY MORNING
"Mama."
I was already smiling before I opened my eyes.
There was a small hand on my shoulder — the patient pressure of someone who had been standing beside a bed for longer than they intended and was beginning to consider escalation.
"Mama."
"I'm awake," I said.
"No, you're not. You're pretending."
I opened one eye.
Liam was standing beside the bed in his dinosaur pajamas — the green ones with the small orange stegosauruses that he had selected himself from the options Jasmine presented on his last birthday, with the focused seriousness he brought to all decisions of consequence. His hair was doing several things simultaneously, none of them intentional, the specific aftermath of a night of committed sleeping.
He looked at me with gray eyes.
Assessing.
"You wer
