The middle years came and went in the way middle years do — in the rhythm of school pickups and bedtime stories, in the slow accumulation of small ordinary joys. Mira did not mark them. She did not keep a calendar. She let them pass the way years pass when you are paying attention to them, and she did not try to count them as they went. Maya grew. It happened in pieces, the way children grow — not in steady increments but in sudden leaps, the way a tree adds a year's worth of growth in a singl...