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thought she was coming to hug me, so I opened up to accept it. I wasn’t her target, though. She walked straight into Mattias’s arms and gave him a bear hug. He gave back as good as he got, even lifting her off her feet and swinging her around while she giggled. His smile was as wide as hers.
    And that was it. I was a goner. There wasn’t any chance I would be able to stop myself from falling for this man. I didn’t know him very well yet, but in these few hours, he’d shown me everything I needed to know.
    My eyes stung, and I put a hand up to cover my mouth, as if that would be enough to stop me from crying. Not that there was any realistic chance of that happening.
    “Thank you, Bergy,” she said when he set her back on the ground.
    He winked and took a knee, dropping down to be on her level. “You’re welcome, Sophie.”
    Zoe dug a tissue out of her purse and brought it over to me. I wiped my eyes with it but gave up after a few tears. They weren’t going to stop any time soon if Mattias kept being this sweet with my baby.
    “Can I meet your sister someday?”
    “Maybe,” he said. “We’ll have to see if we can work that out.”
    “How come she can’t just come over to my house?”
    “Well, she lives a long way away.”
    I heard a sniffle and glanced over to my other girls. They were all three crying, just like I was. I made a mental snapshot of this moment, not wanting to let it slip away too soon.
    “How far?” Sophie asked, turning the palms of her hands up and shrugging. “She could come over tomorrow. Mom won’t mind.”
    “Halfway around the world.”
    Her eyes went wide. “That’s a long way, Bergy. Maybe she can come on Friday.”
    He laughed and said, “Maybe. I’ll have to see what I can work out.”
    “I need you to help me,” she said, her tone as serious as it ever was. I didn’t know what she was about to ask him for, but I started mentally preparing myself to dig him out of whatever hole she tried to drag him into. I knew this tone of voice, and she wasn’t going to give up on whatever it might be very easily. In fact, I was afraid it had something to do with a certain young man named Levi.
    “If it’s something that’s okay with your mother and something I can help you with, I promise you I will.” And he sounded as sincere as she was determined.
    “I want to play hockey like Levi. I want to skate fast.”
    Instantly, my mind started turning over every reason I’d ever been told she’d never be able to do X, Y, or Z. From the moment my OB-GYN had told us that my unborn baby had Down syndrome, they’d been trying to pound into my brain all the things she couldn’t do. Things she would never be able to do, no matter how much she wanted to and no matter how hard she tried.
    I’d never fallen into the trap of letting those impossibilities become reality. I’d always encouraged Sophie to follow her heart, to try to do anything she wanted to do. Dan and I both had spent eleven years telling her she could do whatever she wanted if she just tried hard enough, and we’d held her hand through it all. We’d taught her sisters to treat her exactly the same way we did because letting her believe she couldn’t do something would simply prove it true.
    Sophie had participated in the school choir even though they’d told her she couldn’t sing. She’d run in track meets even though they’d told her she was too slow. She’d learned to read—albeit at a level far lower than her actual age—even though they’d told her she would never do more than learn the alphabet, if that. She’d proven them wrong so many times, and I knew she would many more. But this time, as her mother, I was afraid.
    I was afraid they were right. And I was afraid that she would try, and fail, and try, and fail, and try, and fail…and maybe, eventually, she would just stop trying altogether. And it broke my heart.
    Skating, the act of keeping herself upright on those tiny blades… I didn’t see