And a chance, for a family that came as close to losing everything as this one did, is not a small thing to be given.

It is very nearly everything.

It is the gift I am proudest of, in the end — not the daughter I carried for them, but the honesty her arrival forced into the open, and the chance that honesty gave them to become, at last, a real family: flawed, and struggling, and together, and true.

And I am still, and will always be, part of it — the aunt who was there at the beginning, who carried this bright, stubborn, ordinary girl into the world and then got to keep loving her for the rest of my life, which was the promise I made myself the day I said yes.

Grace is walking now.