Familiarity felt like knowledge.

But familiarity is not knowledge; sometimes it is the very thing that prevents knowledge, because we stop actually looking at the people we see most often, stop revising our picture of them, and simply run the old picture on a loop.

I ran my old picture of Gabriel, the one where his devotion pointed at me, and I missed the true picture entirely, the one where his devotion pointed at protecting my sister, at a promise, at a goodness so quiet and so unshowy that it did not announce itself even to someone watching him every day.

The people we think we know best are sometimes the ones we see least clearly, because we have stopped looking and started assuming.