For a moment, neither of us spoke.
Then I smiled.
“She was annoyingly confident.”
“She usually is.”
He slid an arm around my waist.
“What do you think six-year-old Mia would say if she could see us now?”
I leaned against him.
“She’d say she told us so.”
He kissed my temple.
From the other room, twelve-year-old Mia shouted, “I CAN HEAR YOU!”
We laughed.
Then she appeared in the doorway.
“Also,” she said, “I absolutely did tell you so.”
I looked at Adrian.
He looked at me.
And there it was again—the same deep, helpless laugh I had first heard in an executive hallway years earlier.
Only now I knew what it sounded like in our kitchen.
On Sunday mornings.
During family vacations.
At school plays.
After terrible jokes.
In all the ordinary places where a life was actually lived.
I had once been certain Mia’s impossible little declaration would end my career.
