I said: “That’s actually how biology works, so yes.”
She considered this. “Even when we go back to Daddy’s?”
“Even then,” I said. “You’re going to go back to Dad’s, and you’re still going to have an aunt who thinks you’re the best person she knows.”
She went back to eating her cereal, seemingly satisfied. I stood at the counter for an extra moment before I finished making my coffee.
She wasn’t asking me to be her mother. She wasn’t asking me to replace either of her parents. She was asking something much simpler, which was whether the person who had been doing her mornings for four months was still going to exist in her life when the mornings went back to normal. She was six. That was the question she had the language for.
When Owen said “just the babysitter” eight weeks later, that was part of what he was dismissing.
## The Long Middle: Weeks Twelve Through Twenty
I want to be honest about the middle section of this period, because it isn’t all clean cause-and-effect. There were weeks in the middle where things were actually fine.
Max got into a reading rhythm that spring — he was working through a fantasy series, the kind with a map in the front, and he would tell me about it at dinner in the patient, detailed way that nine-year-olds have when they’re excited about something. I liked those dinners. I liked knowing what he was reading.
Ella developed a complicated friendship with my cat, whose name is Garfield for reasons that should be obvious to anyone who’s met him. She would narrate his day for me when I came home from an afternoon run. “He slept on the blue blanket and then he looked out the window for a long time and then he came back to the blanket,” she would say, as if filing a report. I looked forward to these reports more than I could reasonably justify.