It was that the world had been wrong to doubt her, which is a different thing, and the burden of that wrongness belongs to the world, not to her.

I celebrated her twins not because they justified her but because they were a joy she wanted and received, and a person deserves their joys celebrated for no reason more complicated than that they are loved.

Chapter 12 — Dark Clouds

I should have known, perhaps, that a joy that enormous rarely travels without dark clouds gathering somewhere behind it.

The pregnancy proved, very quickly, to be extremely hard on my sister’s small body.

There were complications from early on, the kind the doctors watched closely and spoke about carefully, and though Gemma carried it all with her usual uncomplaining brightness, I could see the strain of it on her, and I could see the fear that Gabriel worked so hard to keep off his own face whenever she was looking.