No family came for me, because I had none.

What Evelyn had failed to understand, because her own conception of the world was so thoroughly organized around blood and its obligations, was that family is not the only source of the thing she was invoking.

She thought that a person with no family was a person with no one, that kinship was the sole reservoir of the loyalty and protection that come when you are in trouble.

And she was wrong, gloriously wrong, because who came for me was not family and was, in the end, so much more effective than family.