“She’s awake now,” she said gently.

“And she’s asking for both of you.” I reached out and laced my fingers through Gabriel’s hand, holding tight to the brother I had so very nearly misjudged forever, and together the two of us walked into the dim recovery room, where my sister was sitting up in the bed, pale and exhausted and cradling two tiny blue-wrapped bundles, and she looked up at us and smiled a tired, radiant, entirely triumphant smile, the smile of a woman who had been counted out her whole life and had just, one more time, refused to stay down.

I crossed to her bed and I took her hand, careful of the tubes, and she looked up at me with her exhausted radiant face and she said my name, just my name, Nora, the way she had said it ten thousand times across our whole lives, on the bus and in the garden and every morning at nine o’clock on the phone, and it broke something open in me that has never quite closed again.

Because I had almost lost her.