But I’d never seen it.
The couch was gray. I’d thought it was brown. Nigel said once it was “kind of a mushroom color.” I guess it was.
The walls in the hallway were pale yellow. Like butter.
Family photos lined the hallway.
I’d never looked at them before. I’d always known they were there. Nigel had hung them. The kids had picked some of them out. But they’d just been flat rectangles under my fingertips.
Now I stopped and looked.
Ethan as a baby, on Nigel’s shoulders. Rose in a Halloween costume, dressed as a bumblebee, missing her two front teeth. Ethan at his high school graduation in a blue gown. Rose at the beach.
My children.
My actual children.
I touched Rose’s face in the bumblebee photo with one finger, and I cried, and I couldn’t stop.
Then I stopped at one of our wedding pictures.
