Not once.
Not aggressively — she simply became a person who was there.
Saturdays.
School runs, twice a week, which she offered and which I was grateful for.
The pediatrician.
The dentist.
I had experienced that as a woman integrating herself into a family.
The therapist called it something else.
She said: “She was managing the interface.”
Part Five: The Morning
The morning of the wedding was, until three o’clock in the afternoon, one of the better mornings of my life, and I am not going to pretend otherwise now.
Samantha and I got to Pine Crest at nine with the cake in the back of her car, and the pine smell coming off the hills was exactly what I had wanted when I picked that venue.
Hannah was up at six.
She had been dressed by seven-fifteen for a three-o’clock ceremony and had had to be talked out of the shoes for four hours.
My brigade commander came at ten to help move chairs, in a golf shirt, because that is what he is like.
Pamela’s family arrived at eleven.
Her mother, Delia, whom I liked.
Her brother and his wife.
