The party was a success, as such things are reckoned: cake was eaten, presents were opened, bounces were bounced, two knees were skinned (belonging to two separate children), one dress was ruined, and one overexcited child failed to reach the bathroom before vomiting strawberry ice cream and vanilla cake all over the hall. When night fell, Jacqueline and Jillian were safely tucked in their room and Louise was in the kitchen, preparing herself a cup of tea. She heard footsteps behind her. She stopped, and turned, and frowned.

“Out with it,” she said. “You know how Jill fusses if I’m not in my room when she comes looking for midnight kisses.”

“Her name is Jillian, Mother, not Jill,” said Chester.

“So you say,” said Louise.

He sighed. “Please don’t make this more difficult than it has to be.”

“What, exactly?”

“We want to thank you for all the time you’ve spent helping with our children,” said Chester. “They were a handful in the beginning. But I think we have things under control now.”

Five is not where handfuls end, my boy, thought Louise. Aloud, she said, “Is that so?”

“Yes,” said Serena. “Thank you so much, for everything you’ve done. Don’t you think you deserve the chance to rest?”

“There’s nothing tiring about caring for children you love like your own,” said Louise, but she had already lost, and she knew it. She had done her best. She had tried to encourage both girls to be themselves, and not to adhere to the rigid roles their parents were sketching a little more elaborately with every year. She had tried to make sure they knew that there were a hundred, a thousand, a million different ways to be a girl, and that all of them were valid, and that neither of them was doing anything wrong. She had tried.

Whether she had succeeded or not was virtually beside the point, because here were her son and his wife, and now she was going to leave those precious children in the hands of people who had never taken the time to learn anything about them beyond the most narrow, superficial things. They didn’t know that Jillian was brave because she knew Jacqueline was always somewhere behind her with a careful plan for any situation that might arise. They didn’t know that Jacqueline was timid because she was amused by watching the world deal with her sister, and thought the view was better from outside the splash radius.

(They also didn’t know that Jacqueline was developing a slow terror of getting her hands dirty, thanks to them and their constant admonishments about protecting her dresses, which were too fancy by far for a child her age. They wouldn’t have cared if she’d told them.)

“Mother, please,” said Chester, and that was it: she’d lost.

Louise sighed. “When would you like me to go?” she asked.