It helped that Annette was so inconstant. Her flakiness compared poorly to Sarah’s dependability; the way Sarah was always there, quietly standing by, ready to help, when Ruby would let her. It also probably hadn’t hurt that Sarah’s parents, Lee and Veronica, adored Ruby. They would buy her toys and piles of books, and Ronnie would let her take whatever she wanted from Ronnie’s extensive collection of costume jewelry when they visited them. Ronnie and Lee would host them in Boston or on the Cape and plan special outings for Ruby—Broadway shows, museum visits, a trip to a fancy hotel for tea. When Sarah brought Eli and Ruby to their summer place on the Cape, Ronnie had taken Ruby on hikes through the dunes to the cranberry bogs and taught her how to use a clam rake to retrieve shellfish from the bay. Ronnie had been the one to teach Ruby how to ride a bike and sail a Sunfish; how to do a racing dive and a flip turn in the pool. Ruby and Ronnie would swim across ponds together, both of them in navy-blue tank-style suits, Ronnie with a bright-orange personal flotation device looped around her waist. They would ride their bikes into Provincetown for ice-cream cones and sit on the Provincetown Library lawn to watch the Portuguese Festival and the Carnival parade. “All the stuff she used to do with me and my brother, when we were kids,” Sarah said.
Ronnie and Lee had helped. The Cape itself had helped. The house they’d eventually purchased had, too. Eli and Sarah and Ruby spent three months of weekends house-hunting, looking for a place that they could all share. Eventually they’d found a slightly dilapidated brownstone that had been owned by just one family for the last eighty years. “It’s like a castle!” Ruby said when she’d first glimpsed the place from the sidewalk. Eli supposed that, after life in an apartment, a four-story house might, indeed, look that way to a little girl. While Sarah stood in the kitchen, quizzing the contractor about the HVAC and the pipes （a conversation she’d spent the previous night prepping for with a book called Home Heating and Cooling for Dummies）， Ruby had walked slowly up the staircase, stopping on each floor and counting the number of rooms out loud. When she got to the attic, Eli had been right behind her. He’d watched as she’d stopped, mouth agape. Her favorite book at the moment was A Little Princess （Eli didn’t doubt that, in her head, Ruby had assigned poor Sarah the role of cruel Miss Minchin, who banishes the orphaned Sara Crewe to the attic）。 Ruby had looked, then gone racing down the stairs to find Sarah and tow her up to the attic, pulling her by the hand. “Please, please, can we buy this house and can this please be my bedroom?” she’d asked.
Sarah pretended to think about it. “Really? You want to be all the way up here? By yourself? Are you sure?”
“Yes! Please! I’m sure! It’s so so perfect!”
“Okay, but only if you promise you’ll help me pick out the wallpaper.”
“I promise! I promise!” Ruby had yelped, and she’d thrown her arms around Sarah’s midriff, almost tackling her to the ground.
Eli and Sarah had gotten married six months later. By then, they were coasting on the fumes of the last of Ruby’s initial goodwill and her excitement about the new house. The hard years were coming, but back then, Ruby had been thrilled about the wedding, insisting on writing vows welcoming Sarah into the family, and giving Sarah a special necklace that she and Eli picked out, a gift just from her. When Sarah had promised, before the rabbi and God and all their guests, to love them both, for as long as she lived, most of the guests and both Eli’s mother and Sarah’s were crying.
For years, Ruby had reigned as queen of the attic. Eli and Sarah got used to the sound of Ruby’s little feet stomping up those stairs, the door closing at a volume just short of a slam. Then Dexter arrived, and then Miles. Ruby had loved her brothers, and had, finally, let Sarah love her. And Eli was happy, happier than he’d ever hoped he’d be after Annette had left him. He had a circle of friends, hobbies he enjoyed. He cycled with a local club, played squash once a week, brewed his own beer in the basement. He was grateful for his good fortune, for his marriage, his beautiful family, his second chance, and he’d taken care to behave in a way that showed that gratitude. He’d been kind to his patients and generous with his colleagues, to the students he taught and to the people he employed. He gave money to charity; he supported diversity initiatives and Black Lives Matter and the women who spoke out when #MeToo became a thing. He added his pronouns to his online biography and refused to speak at seminars or on panels to which only straight white men had been invited. He called his parents every week and visited them every month. When his brother, Ari （at fifty-four, still the family fuck-up）， forgot their parents’ birthdays or anniversaries, Eli added his name to the card or the gift that he, Eli, had purchased, and lied when their mother asked. Oh, yeah, Ari helped me pick it out. He knows orchids are your favorite! When Ruby came home with friends Eli would ask what pronouns they used. He did his best to be respectful and apologized when he got it wrong. He tried to move through the world gently, to follow the Hippocratic oath: Do no harm.