He could have grown tired, or afraid, or resentful of the enormous lie he had to maintain, the sister he had to pretend was dead, the woman he loved enough to protect but had agreed to keep at the far edge of both their lives.

He never wavered.

He got up every morning inside a fiction he had built to shelter me, and he lived in it so completely and so gently that I never once, in twenty-four years, felt the walls of it.

That is the thing I understand now that I did not understand as a child: that the ordinariness of my childhood was itself the masterpiece.

The apple pancakes, the quiet mornings, the unremarkable life — I had thought those things were simply what I had, the plain furniture of an ordinary girlhood.

They were not plain.