جميع فصول : الفصل -الفصل 100

February becomes March and Lucia now looks different. Grown.Not dramatically actually, just incrementally. The way all real things grow, in the small daily accumulations that you don't notice until you look back and the distance is larger than you expected.She is two weeks old. Three weeks. Four.She sleeps in patterns and feeds with the determination of someone who has decided that eating is worth taking seriously. She looks at the world with the insight and attention that has been hers from the first night and that I have stopped being surprised by and started simply accepting as who she is.She is Lucia and she is just exactly herself from the beginning.The apartment settles into what it is now. Three people rather than two. The specific choreography of a life that has added a new center of gravity and is finding its balance.I learn things. Things I'd have said was fascinating.How to make coffee one-handed. How to read during feeds with the phone propped at the right angle. Ho

Diane comes to the Thursday dinner.It's two weeks after the break room conversation. She arrives at the Italian restaurant looking the way people look when they're walking into something significant and have decided that composure is the right approach. Practical. Shoulders back. Taking in the room the moment she enters it.She stops just inside the door and reads the room.Six of us already at the table. Me and Thalia and Margot, who is still in Chicago, and Adaeze and Soren who have been here since November. Ezra at the end.Diane stands in the doorway and reads the room and something happens in her face.The same thing that happened in Margot's face when I walked into the hotel lobby four months ago.Recognition.Not of faces. Of frequency.The quality. The connection of a room full of people who carry the same thing which you just have to feel. She crosses to the table.and takes a sit. She then looks around at the six of us."You all feel like that," she says."Like what?" Thali

April arrives.Lucia is ten weeks old and she has opinions about almost everything.This is not an exaggeration. She has an opinion about the angle of the morning light. She has an opinion about the blue blanket versus the green one, which she communicates through a very specific sound that Dominic identified before I did, which I have chosen not to mention because it clearly gives him disproportionate satisfaction. She has an opinion about which songs he plays on the piano and which ones she finds merely acceptable.She is entirely her mother's daughter.He says this approximately once a day and I have started saying thank you instead of arguing because he means it as a compliment and I have decided to receive it as one.Life has the quality that I described to Petra in March. Settled. Like something that was moving has found its pace rather than stopping. The movement continues. Edinburgh continues. Pren and I have had three calls about the larger structure and Rosamund is drafting

June.Lucia is now four months old.She has two things she says clearly now. "Ma" and "Da", both of which she deploys with the precision of someone who understands that specific sounds produce specific responses and is using this knowledge efficiently.Dominic responds to "Da" with the expression that has no name every single time without exception.I have stopped finding this remarkable and started finding it simply true. The way the morning light is true. The way the piano on Sundays is true. The way certain things settle into the fabric of a life and become part of its texture rather than events within it.He is a father.He is good at it in the ways I knew he would be and surprising in the ways I didn't predict. The thoroughness, the research, the deliberate preparation, all of that I expected. What I didn't expect was the sentimental gentleness. The way he holds her that is different from the way he holds anything else, not more careful, more present, as if she asks for a quality

July arrives with the warmth and chill of a Chicago July that doesn't apologize for itself. The city at its most itself, outdoor everything and the lake and people moving through the heat with the determined enjoyment of people who endured five months of cold and are going to make the most of every degree above seventy.Lucia is five months old and she finally has the third word now.It arrived on a Tuesday morning and it was, as Dominic predicted, something she decided mattered."Li."Her version of her name.The first time she said it I was at the kitchen window watering the herbs and she said it from the bouncy seat with the specific satisfaction of someone who has been working toward something and has arrived.I turned around.She looked at me."Li."I looked at her for a moment.Then I said: "Yes. That's you."She said it again bouncing on the seat in joy. Smiling so wide I could see her toothless gum."Li."Three times. How establishing.Dominic came in from the hallway and she