At thirty-four weeks, it turned.

Gemma collapsed, suddenly, at home, and was rushed to the regional medical center, and the first prognosis the emergency doctors gave was grim enough that I do not like to remember the sound of it.

I will not lay out the clinical particulars of what went wrong inside my sister’s body that night, both because I could not do it accurately and because the particulars are not the point; the point is that the woman I had protected since I was seven years old, who had just been given every joy the world once swore she would never have, was now, at thirty-four weeks pregnant with two babies, fighting for her life.

I drove to the hospital with my hands shaking on the wheel and a single sentence repeating in my head, the same one I had been saying since I was a child, the promise underneath all the other promises, the deepest promise, the one no one had ever spoken aloud but that a few of us had simply lived, that Gemma would be loved, actually loved, not managed or tolerated or provided for but loved, for exactly who she was: you’ll always have me, Gemma.