Her error was not vanity.

It was a failure of imagination about how large and how strange love can be, about the shapes it can take beyond the ones a seventeen-year-old has words for.

I forgive her.

She could not have known.

The truth was too far outside the range of what a girl daydreaming at her mirror could possibly have guessed.

Chapter 6 — The Blue Velvet Box

I was twenty-two when Gabriel came to our door one sunny Sunday afternoon holding a small blue velvet box in the palm of his hand.