I look back at the last day of our old life with a kind of wonder now: the million summer freedoms, the complacency of our ease.
I watched the cricket with Max on my knee. Friends came to visit, and Ruth fed Max while we talked about our new neighbourhood among piles of books and packing boxes. Max gurgled regally as I changed one of his famous nappies. I organised our phone chargers and put his birth certificate carefully in a drawer with our passports and the mortgage statement. Then I hung a picture in what would soon be his room: a print from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, of a little boy sailing bravely across the ocean, with “Max” emblazoned on the prow of his ship. I stood back and admired it, feeling all three of us to be limitless, and wondering what would happen next.
