“Rory! Over here!” She squinted, then her face broke into a smile as she ran toward me. Her dark-brown hair had come out of its ponytail and hung in ringlets around her cheeks, and her elfin face wore its usual merry expression. It always surprised me, how I felt when I saw her, how I loved her more than I’d thought it was possible to love anyone.

She pulled up right at my side, out of breath, and shoved a folded piece of paper into my hand. “We have to do a family tree.”

I took the paper, examining it.

“See. Look.” Rory snatched back the assignment, pointing at the lines that were connected to the tree trunk. “You have to put your mother and your father and your grandmother and grandfather and brothers and sisters if you’ve got them.” She paused for a breath. “Do you know Sophie has two brothers and two sisters?” Her tone suggested that she could barely imagine such riches.

“I do know that.” I also knew that Sophie’s parents had conceived both sets of twins with the help of donor insemination and all four children had been carried by two different surrogates at the same time. Maybe Rory’s tale wouldn’t be the only strange one in the class.

My daughter slipped her hand into mine, and we started the routines of our walk home. “Candy treat?” she asked as we passed the drugstore, and I said, “Okay.”

We went through the drugstore’s automatic doors — when she’d been little, Rory had loved to hop back and forth over the threshold, determining just how far inside she’d have to be to get the doors to work — and selected a bag of M&M’s. Rory counted each coin carefully before sliding it across the counter, then skipped home along the sidewalk, singing to herself, with the candy rattling in her pocket. Upstairs, in the apartment that Marcus had left me, along with more money than I could ever hope to spend, Rory sat at the kitchen table, sorting the M&M’s by color, lining them up in rows, then eating them one at a time, first brown, then yellow, then red, then blue, and then, finally, the green ones. She practiced her recorder for ten minutes, then looked at the schedule taped to the stainless-steel refrigerator. Wednesday was her recorder lesson; on Fridays, she had tumbling. On Sunday afternoons, Jules and Kimmie came over to spend the afternoon and take her out for dinner (these days, she favored sushi). Jules and Kimmie were married now. They’d had a sunset ceremony on a beach in Martha’s Vineyard and were talking about having a baby of their own. Kimmie was doing research for a pharmacology company, and Jules had left the world of finance, gone back to school for a journalism degree, and gotten what she laughingly called the last job as an investigative reporter at the last magazine left in New York.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, Bettina came over after work for dinner, and once a month she hosted Rory at her apartment downtown. She’d gone back to work at Kohler’s and was still dating Darren, and, while I didn’t think the two of us would ever be best friends, we enjoyed each other’s company well enough when Rory brought us together.

Once a month, Rory and I made the trip to Phoenixville, where Rory would spend the weekend with Annie and Frank and Frank Junior and Spencer, who doted on her, introducing her as their sister and treating her like a doll. Like Jules, Annie had gone back to school. In another year she’d have her bachelor’s degree, and then she’d apply for teaching jobs in the same school system her boys attended.

Sometimes I worried it was confusing — all these people, all these different places, different expectations, different rules — but Rory seemed to manage it all with aplomb. She was a natural negotiator, knowing, intuitively, how to get along and play well with others. In that — in so many ways, in little gestures, in the shape of her feet and her fingers, in the way she’d press her lips together, humming while she thought — she reminded me of her father.

“Homework,” I said, and she ran to her room. The nursery had been all pale pink and green when she’d been a baby, before her true nature had revealed itself. Rory wasn’t a pink-bedroom girl, although, like all her peers, she’d undergone a brief but fervent infatuation with the Disney princesses. Now her space was outfitted with an oversize desk that held footlong plastic bins in which Rory stored her Legos, her snap circuit kit, the collection of old cell phones and calculators she’d taken apart, and plastic bins full of laboriously printed and drawn plans labeled EXPERIMINTS AND INVENSHUNS.

We still lived in the apartment in the San Giacomo, but I’d sold the bottom floor, which meant we’d been reduced — quote-unquote — to just four bedrooms: one for me, one for Rory, and two guest suites with their own bathrooms for whoever came to stay, Bettina and Darren, Annie and Frank and their boys. I’d given a lot of the art away to museums and let go of most of the staff, although I still had someone to clean, and to cook when I entertained. I’d gone back to work part-time, and I volunteered at Rory’s school, organizing fund-raising events and the annual Book and Bake Sale, raising money for the new library and the class trips to Portugual and Spain that Rory would take as an eighth-grader. I’d even made two friends, other mothers with kids in Rory’s class, one married, one single. I’d thought about dating, but hadn’t yet. Secretly, I suspected that that part of my life was over. I’d had my big love, and now, at forty-eight (although my friends told me I didn’t look a day over forty), I had memories, friends, a weird kind of family, and a daughter I loved with all my heart. . and, surely, there were worse things than that.

Rory came dashing back into the room in her favorite sparkly T-shirt (white, long-sleeved, with a sequined heart on the chest) and a pair of navy-blue Columbia sweatpants that Kimmie had given her. We sat in the kitchen, the room where Rory and I spent most of our time together. I’d moved one of the Persian rugs from the apartment I’d sold into one of the kitchen’s corners and bought a round table and four chairs, and moved my laptop from the desk in the dressing room onto the kitchen counter. Rory would do her homework at one end of the table; I’d sit, with my laptop, at the opposite end, where I would look up recipes or send out notices about fund-raisers and committee meetings, and e-mail pictures to Annie.

Rory smoothed the page on the table. She’d written her name in big capital letters in the center of the tree trunk.

“You know the story, right?”

She gave a theatrical sigh — I wasn’t sure who she’d picked that up from — and then began. “Once upon a time there was a mommy with no baby, and she wanted a baby more than anything else in the world.”

“Right you are.” This was a bit of revisionist history, but Annie was the one who’d come up with this story, the mythology of Rory’s essential beginnings, and I’d never tried to change it.

“So the mommy and the daddy found a lady to give them a seed that would become a baby, and that lady was Jules. Then the seed got planted in another lady, and that lady was my tummy mommy, and that lady was Annie.” She peered at her paper. “Where do I put ‘tummy mommy’?”

“Hmm. Why don’t we write her right next to the tree trunk.” I tapped the paper. Rory frowned. She believed in rules and could be inflexible when it came to doing things the right way, but she let me help her write “Annie” just above her own name. I wondered again why the teachers had made this assignment, why they’d sent the kids home with a family tree with spaces for mother and father but no room for alternate configurations, when, in addition to the twins-by-surrogate, at least two kids in Rory’s class had two mommies, one had two daddies, and one little girl in the second grade had parents who’d divorced their spouses and married each other, which surely made for some awkward parent-teacher conferences.

“And then my daddy died and went to heaven, where he watches over me every day.”

I nodded, swallowing hard, pointing at the spot for “father.” Annie, the most religious of us, had told Rory about Marcus, and about heaven, and I hadn’t quarreled.

“And then I was born and the mommy was sooo happy to have me, and when I got my name everyone came to give me gifts, like in the story of the princess in Sleeping Beauty. Only people, not fairies.” She waited for my nod. “Bettina gave me grace. Jules gave me. .” She chewed at her lower lip. “What’s the fancy word for smart?”

“Intelligence?”

“Right. And Annie made me happy and smiley and friendly, and you are my mom, and you give me the gift of love, and that,” she concluded, her voice rising in triumph, “that is why you named me Aurora.”

“Right,” I said, and gathered her into my arms. Bettina had been the one who’d named her, maybe knowing, or maybe just hoping, that all of us would be there for this child, like the good fairies who’d gathered around Sleeping Beauty’s crib to give her the best gifts they had. Someday, I’d tell her that, the whole story, how I’d left after her father had died and how her sister had been the one to name her. I gave her a kiss. For a moment, she resisted — she was growing up, “not a baby,” as she reminded me all the time, and she was getting too old to want to snuggle the way she used to — but at least once a day she’d let me hold her. “And we all love you. .”

“… very, very much.” Her voice was muffled, her face tucked into my shoulder. When she popped out, her eyes were bright, and she was smiling, exposing the space where she’d lost her first tooth the week before. “TV now?”

“TV,” I said, and watched her go, running off, barefoot in her sweatpants, because Rory was a girl who never walked when she could run. She had her father’s broad face and round cheeks, her sister Bettina’s thick hair, Jules’s fierce intellect and unwavering sense of right and wrong, and Annie’s sweetness and generosity. She had the best of all of us, and, as for me, I had a life that was happier than I could have imagined.