A husband who loved her.

A home of her own.

And now, motherhood, the biggest one, the one that even some of the kinder voices had gently suggested was simply out of reach, was arriving, twice over, in a yellow house on the edge of town.

I want to be careful how I say this, because my sister’s worth was never conditional on her doing any of these things; she was a whole and precious person on the day she was born and would have remained one if she had never married or had a child at all.

But there was a particular sweetness, a particular vindicating joy, in watching a woman the world had counted out receive, one by one, the very things it had sworn she could not have.