She would call, and describe her outfit, and then tell me what she and Gabriel were doing that day, and it was, gloriously, ordinary.

They were going to the farmers market.

He was teaching her to make his grandmother’s soup.

They had watched a movie and she had cried at the sad part and he had cried too, to keep her company.

It was a whole life, an ordinary happy chosen life, full of the small daily textures that make a life, and every detail of it was a quiet rebuke to everyone who had ever decided in advance what my sister’s life would have to be.

The tragedy that my parents nearly authored was not only that they might have locked her somewhere joyless; it was that they were prepared to erase all of this, the market and the soup and the movies and the nine o’clock calls, the entire luminous ordinary texture of a happy life, because they could not be bothered to imagine that a life like Gemma’s could be worth living, could be full, could be exactly as rich as anyone’s.