Looking back, the signs of my parents’ coldness were everywhere, hidden in plain sight, the way the truth so often is.

It was in the way they spoke about Gemma when they thought I wasn’t listening, always in the language of logistics and provision, never in the language of delight.

Other parents talked about their children’s futures with hope, with dreaming, with the ordinary extravagant optimism of people imagining good things for someone they love.

My parents talked about Gemma’s future the way you talk about a liability to be managed, and I heard it, over the years, in a hundred small conversations, and I did not let myself understand it, because to understand it would have been unbearable.

It is a strange and terrible thing to realize, as an adult, that your parents’ love was conditional, and more terrible still to realize it was conditional on something as arbitrary as a child arriving into the world exactly as ordered.