Gemma had done nothing to earn their coldness except be born as she was.

And they had responded not with the fierce protective love that difference ought to summon in a parent, but with a slow, quiet, decades-long project of distance.

I did not see it as a child.

I see it now.

And I have had to grieve, in my own way, not the loss of my parents, but the discovery that the parents I thought I had were, underneath the polished surface, never quite the people I believed them to be.

For now there was only Gemma at the window, and the rattle of tires on gravel, and the long gold afternoons, and a coldness at the edges of it all that I was not yet wise enough to name.