Absence can be as strongly felt as presence, and soon Ben, too, became obsessed with family math. He would stare at the snapshots I’d taken of his half sister holding him as a newborn: he in a tie-dye onesie, she in a matching tie-dye T-shirt. He would stare at the pictures of the two of them at his cousins’ country house taken a few summers later. He wanted to have a sibling and be a sibling. “Even if you rarely see her, and even if you feel like sometimes she doesn’t exist.”I was telling him to count her.

Source: New York Times November 29, 2019 04:52 UTC