I lay there, twenty-two years old, and I let jealousy whisper poison to me about my own sister, my own Gemma, whom I had protected since I was seven, as though her happiness were a theft committed against me.

I want to be honest about those thoughts, as ashamed as I am of them, because of what came later.

Because the cruelest irony of my life is this: that in my jealousy, in the very worst and least generous corner of my heart, I had convinced myself that Gabriel must have a hidden reason for marrying my sister, some motive that was not simple love.

And I was, in a sense I could not have imagined, correct.