Back home, Oliver pours himself a drink and joins Sam in front of the television for the “New Year’s Eve Spectacular” that consists of a camera panning across screaming twenty-somethings crowded into iron pens in Times Square, inter-cut with vacuous banter from the two celebrity co-presenters.

“New Year’s Eve is weird,” Sam says.

“How so?” I say.

“Well, everyone acts like it’s such a big deal,” he says. “But it’s not like anything really changes.”

I’d meant to stay and watch the TV special with them, but somehow I feel restless, uneasy. I’m thinking about the stuff Abigail said to Sam again, and then when I put that out of my mind I flash back to the call with Dinah. It’s like my brain has just decided to be in worry mode for the night.

I retreat from the living room for a bit and open my laptop at the kitchen table. The snow outside is still all but pristine, not yet slushy.

No email from my sister—not that I expected it, really. I sigh and sit back from the computer, watching the garden for a moment. Then I get up and pour myself a cup of hot water—limiting my daily caffeine intake is a part of the pregnancy-aspiration diet I haven’t given up just yet—and sit back down in front of my screen. I hesitate, then open the browser and type in OCD in kids. I blow on the hot water, and sip as I click on the first article. I read it all the way through, then go back to the search page and read the next one. Then a third. Then a fourth.

One of the take-home messages, of course, is that everybody’s different: OCD looks different on different people. But there are common threads.

“Rituals,” as Dinah called it, are the biggest one. These are the compulsive behaviors, and excessive hand-washing is a common one. But they can be just about anything, these rituals. Sometimes it’s doing a perfectly normal thing more times than is necessary, until you reach a certain pattern or number—like flicking a switch seven times instead of just one. Often the rituals are just exaggerated, overly completist versions of normal daily tasks, like brushing your teeth one by one, or saying evening prayers that take forty-five minutes. It says that children with OCD may have rituals of getting ready in the morning or going to bed at night which get debilitating because they become so lengthy and complex. I feel the hairs prickle on my neck, thinking of how difficult it’s been to get Sam out the door in the mornings, and how agitated, almost tearful, it seemed to make him when I rushed him. How I swear I saw him re-tie a shoelace three times the other day.