The baby arrived on a Thursday in September, at three seventeen in the afternoon, in a hospital that smelled like hospitals and moved with the efficient kindness of people who do this every day and have not stopped finding it remarkable.
She was seven pounds, four ounces, and had Nathaniel's dark eyes and Claire's determination about making her feelings known, a combination that seemed from the very first hour to be going to require attention.
Nathaniel, who had been holding Claire's hand through six hours of labor with the particular focused intensity of a man who had applied his entire professional capacity for sustained attention to a single purpose, looked at the baby the way he had looked at Claire in that garden in May.
Like something he had not known to ask for and could not now
