It is a lie, and a particularly cruel one to tell a child, because children believe what adults tell them about how the world works, and a child who is taught that love is scarce will spend his whole life guarding the little he thinks he has instead of learning that it multiplies the more of it he gives away.

I made one thing clear to everyone from the very start, and I said it as often as it needed saying.

I was not trying to replace Daisy in Silas’s heart, and Daisy was not competing with me for his.

He did not have to choose.

That was the lie at the root of everything that had been done to him — the idea, drilled into a fourteen-year-old, that loving one person meant giving up another, that a family was a fixed number of seats and someone always had to be left standing.

He needed to learn, slowly, in his own time, that love does not work that way, that a heart is not a house with a fixed number of rooms but something that simply builds more as more people move in.