Elliott was resentful of her for a long time; perhaps still. We had told him there would be another baby, but of course he couldn’t have understood what that would mean, any more than we could. He was shy, and it pained him to see how she met people with joy and they accepted her in the same spirit, because it was something he could not do. I watched with my own pain as his face grew more and more shut. I held him and told him softly that I loved him, and he knew that that was true, but it couldn’t make up for the fact that everyone else seemed to love Katie.

I did what I could; but oh, I was so tired. Stephen, the understanding grown-up Stephen, knew and did his best. But he was weary too, and overworked, and his mind was divided among us all; there was a limit to how much he could help, and he needed things from me too. He needed gratitude and reassurance and love, and I felt sometimes there must be three of me, one for each of them.

My life flattened. I was busy, constantly busy, for although the spark of freedom, the hint of aloneness I had felt still waited in my mind, I was responsible to my children. They were my work. I read to Elliott or played with him when Katie was asleep, talked vaguely to him while I fed or cuddled her, and let Stephen take over for a while in the evenings, while I got dinner and did dishes. And then Katie would sleep and Elliott would have his own time with his father while I might read, and then Elliott would go to bed and Katie would wake up to be fed and finally Stephen and I would have a little while together before it all started again. I loved them all, I did my best, I did everything I could, and I was exhausted.

The children grew and changed, and Katie was more than a year old, Elliott almost four, when one night Stephen brought home champagne, beaming with a secret. After the children were in bed, he told me why and his face was young and proud. I saw then it had gotten older, while I had not noticed.

He’d been told, he said, that within six months he would have another promotion, a major one, and he would have gone as far as he could reasonably expect for a long time. We would be exceedingly comfortable financially. His idea was to “settle down” as he put it, as if we weren’t already as settled as it was possible to be. We would buy the “dream house” that would give us plenty of space and privacy and we would get a cleaning lady and I would not be so tired and everything would be the way he had always wanted it to be. It sounded wonderful; it gave me enough hope to keep going.