He had met Renata at a city planning commission meeting 22 years ago, when he was representing Hayward and Associates on a storm drainage project and she was representing the neighborhood association affected by the project's proposed routing. She had asked three questions at that meeting, each of which identified a genuine flaw in the proposed routing, each of which was presented without rancor, with the specific organized clarity of someone who has done her homework and is presenting her findings rather than her feelings.
He had thought, listening to her questions, she is right on all three counts. He had said so in the meeting, which was an unusual thing to say on behalf of a client in a public forum, but it was what the situation required. She had looked at him from across the room with the particular expression of someone who was not expecting that.
They had spoken after the meeting. He had called her three days later.
She was 56 now, a licensed landscape architect and urban planner, partner at Renata Beaumont Design, which had won three city beautification contracts in the past five years, and whose work could be seen in the median plantings on the city's central corridor and in the redesigned plaza in front of City Hall.
They had been married for 19 years. Amara was the most complex project they had undertaken together, the one they discussed most thoroughly, and about which they were most invested in the outcome—which was the outcome that all parents aim for: a person who knows how to be good and how to be strong and how to be both at once, which is harder than either alone.
His daughter Amara was nine years old and in fourth grade. She had her mother's eyes and her father's capacity for stillness, which was the quality that teachers most often mentioned when they described her. She was a listener, they said, in the particular appreciative tone of adults who have discovered that some children listen before they speak, and who find this remarkable because it is.
She attended Westbrook because the school had an advanced learning program in mathematics and science that her parents had researched and chosen deliberately, which required a drive across two school districts, but which they had agreed was worth the drive. Amara had not been consulted about whether it was worth the drive. She had, in her second week of second grade, told her father on the way home that she liked it here because the teacher let her read a book when she finished the assignment.
He had said, "That's a good teacher."
She had said, "Yes, she is."
He had said, "You can finish your assignment by now."