She had laughed.

Those were the facts, in their own voices, and there was no unhearing them.

I had loved Sabine, is the thing.

Not the way I’d loved Callum — there was no romance to disillusion — but in the plainer, deeper way you love family you’ve decided to claim.

She had come into my life as a half-grown girl I had no obligation to, the daughter of my father’s other life, and I had chosen her anyway, chosen to make her mine, because I believed that family was something you built by choosing and not just something you were handed by blood.

I had been proud of that choice.