That year, having just started Morningside Montessori, having lost the few friends he’d made in public school as well as the comfort of a place and routine he knew—even if that school didn’t know what to do with him, and now, in its sudden absence, it was loved and missed beyond expectation—a sense of being alone in the world consumed him. He saw people only in terms of the shape and size of their families: specifically, whether or not they had siblings. Which most of them did. And he did not.

The few only-children we knew—born to couples who had, like us, started late and had decided to stop at just one—were our salvation, until each went back on their assurances to us that they would not have another child and all the other only-children in Teddy’s universe became older siblings. The semicomical betrayal we’d feel when, over dinner, the announcement would come—Sorry! We’re pregnant!—and after the baby itself arrived, that betrayal would turn on the fulcrum of Teddy’s heartbreak. Becoming a sibling was a magical occurrence bestowed on other people but not on him, a fact that deepened the divide between him and the rest of the world, proving time and again to him that happiness was for other people, not for him. It was then that he started looking at the world with a sad hunger, a longing, a deep wish to be connected, to join, to be accepted into the arms of a big noisy happy family. Which we’re not. Because we’re just three. And three never felt like enough. It didn’t when I was growing up. And it doesn’t now.

Everyone else is lucky, he’d say. They have siblings.

I know, I’d say.

I really want one.

I know, I’d say again. Because I did know. I knew the longing, the solitude, the unbearable quiet of living in a house with no other children. And I also knew that I was too old to have another baby, because I was already almost too old when I’d had Teddy.

Sometimes we’d be driving when he’d talk about wanting a sibling—he’d be in the backseat because he was too young still to sit up front—on the way back from a playdate toward home, and a thick foggy sadness would creep into the car from the inside out. Sometimes we’d be in his room at night, me sitting on the edge of his bed and rubbing his back and talking to him about his day—a routine that is still in place, even now, despite all my complaining about the distance between us during the day, in public.

Sometimes it would be right after he’d come in for the night after playing all day with the kids on the street. He’d walk inside alone at dusk, and I’d catch him taking one last look over his shoulder to see everyone else paired, two by two, going home together for baths and dinner.

Sometimes, like when we’d leave from a visit with Gary’s mother and sisters in New Hampshire—cousins and dogs spilling out into the backyard, all the kids in shorts swatting at mosquitoes, their bug spray and sunscreen long since worn off—there wouldn’t be words at all. I’d see his face, full of joy at being part of a whole—at having a place in a big family—that feeling of fullness that comes from being in the midst of all that energy and activity, of all that life—right before it would fall, cheeks and eyes and mouth changing shape, dissolving, caving into itself like a dying flower.