They had looked at a woman with a newborn and seen someone weak.

They had been catastrophically wrong.

Finn had a father who walked through the door at the exact moment it mattered.

He had a mother who had stopped asking anyone’s permission to exist.

And he had the legacy of a great-grandmother who had reached across her own death to protect a child she would never meet, guarding his future before he was even born.

Adele knelt down in the grass beside her son and put her arm around him, and for a moment the three living generations and the one buried one were all gathered in the same small circle of sunlight — Georgiana under the granite, Adele beside it, Finn’s hand flat against the cool stone, and Bram standing watch a few feet off.