It took nearly losing my sister to make me finally, actually look at Gabriel, and see, at last, the whole astonishing truth of who he had been all along.

I have made a certain peace, over the years, with the girl I was at seventeen, the one so certain of a future that was never going to arrive.

I used to be embarrassed by her, by the depth of her wrongness.

But I have come to feel tenderly toward her instead, because her mistake was, at bottom, a generous one.

She believed Gabriel loved her because she could not imagine that his devotion to their little family pointed anywhere but at her; she had simply never conceived that a person could love that fiercely and have it point at protecting her sister, a form of love she was too young to recognize because it looked nothing like romance.