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The day Mary Elizabeth had been born, he remembered how Susan had cried; he’d forced himself to cry with her. “I know,” he said to Susan, smiling, hugging her. Susan shook her head. He sat back, then, stopped hugging her, and balanced on the edge of her hospital bed, thinking, hormones. They’d been through it once already, with Thomas, three years earlier. In tears one minute and hysterical laughter the next. “I’m crying,” she said, “because I can’t think of a single place in the world that I can make safe enough for her.
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