Honey dripped from her son’s chubby fingers as clouds hung low over the mountains visible from the back porch of their new house. The sun, Molly noticed as she folded down Sebastian’s collar, had turned his hair a pretty shade of gold. Blond didn’t run in her family—she, like her mother, was known for her …

I stand at the counter eating walnuts by the handful while the cookies cool on their racks. You are across the kitchen, shuffling papers, marking them with bright red ink. You are a million miles away, lost amid a sea of essays, sheaves of analysis, reams of fuddled words and muddied meanings. I stand on …