ALL THAT PAIN, all the bittersweet agony of labor, all the fumbling drama in the snowstorm: all of that had led to Beau. From the moment of his birth, he’d seized my heart in a way nothing ever had before or ever would again. I didn’t love Rorie any less than Beau: surely a statement every mother in the world could understand. I’d die for both of them, willingly and instantly. But Beau, with his old soul and his repertoire of empathetic expressions, was his father incarnate. The universe had robbed me of the love of my life and then brought him back in the midst of a tempest, the swirly snowy winds somehow transferring my lover’s soul into his boy. From the first time I held him, I knew what a gift he was.

Now, on Beau’s seventh birthday, I slid out of my chair and FaceTimed Vani. “He’s in the living room,” I said in a whisper. “I’m going to surprise him.”

Beau sat, his hunched back to the door, at a tiny red table. Even viewing the back of his head, I could sense the intensity of his concentration as he wrote in his notebook. Stepping lightly, I snuck up behind him and tapped his small shoulder. “Call for you,” I said.

Beau turned, wearing an expression of anticipation, which upgraded into delight as he caught sight of the phone. “Auntie Vani,” he said. “I am so happy to see you!”

“I’m happy to see you as well,” said Vani. Her eyes, so large and dark, shone through the pixilation of the phone screen. Suddenly I remembered how she’d cried, holding Beau up to me in the moments after his birth. “The happiest of birthdays to you, beloved godchild.”

“It has been wonderful,” said Beau. Oh, this child! It had not been wonderful; it had been a remarkably crappy birthday, with no friends, no party, no big fuss other than a terrible collapsed cake I’d attempted to bake. Beau had eaten an entire piece of the dense, undersweetened wad of gunk and pronounced it delectable. Delectable was his new word for every bit of food he encountered.

“What’s been wonderful, sweet boy?” asked Vani.

Beau offered a sunny smile. “My mom’s been home,” he said.

Ouch. I left Beau with the phone, prattling to Vani about a story he was writing, and slipped into a windowed nook off the kitchen I’d commandeered as my home office. We no longer lived in the Beige Box, fortunately. The new house, shingled and viney, sat in a wooded lot and possessed a lot of age-related quirks, but what it lacked in modern design it more than made up for in personality.

I fired up my laptop to read emails. Over the last few weeks, we’d established a clinical investigation team to build a database of every suspected case of what we now were calling—with apologies to Alex Rodriguez—AAROD.