I was only the person who, at last, stepped out of its way.

I pressed a kiss to my son’s forehead, and then to my daughter’s, and I breathed them in — the impossible milky brand-new smell of them — and I felt the last of the fear go out of me and something steadier take its place.

My grandfather had reached across ten years and across the boundary of his own death to build a wall around these two children before they were even conceived, because he had understood, long before I did, that love is not only a feeling.

Sometimes love is a legal instrument, drafted in advance, by someone who refuses to let you be unprotected after they are gone.

I stood up, slowly, one baby in each arm, and I stepped forward — out of that lounge, out of that marriage, out of the whole ruined structure of the life Flynn had built and lost — and into a future in which my children and I would never, for a single day, be unprotected again.