Then, almost overnight, he became obsessed with giving me a family, and I didn’t understand why until it was almost too late.
I threw myself into my job, he took up fishing, and we learned how to live in our too-quiet house without talking about what was missing.
The first time I noticed it, we were passing a playground near our house when Joshua stopped walking.
“Look at them,” he said, watching the kids climb and shout. “Remember when we thought that’d be us?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He kept staring. “Does it still bother you?”
“Remember when we thought that’d be us?”
I looked at him then. There was something hungry in his face I hadn’t seen in years.
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