“It’s true and it’s not the whole thing,” said Sabrina, “and you taught me that, actually, when I was seven, when I said I was fine about my mother.”

I sat down.

And then I said the disloyal thing. The one I had been carrying since November and had not said to a single living person, including Helen.

“You came back,” I said. “And I thought that would fix it. I thought — she’s here, she’s alive, she’s in my back bedroom with a baby, the thing I have been afraid of for twenty years didn’t happen after all, so the fear can stop now.”

“And it didn’t stop.”

“It didn’t touch it,” I said. “Sabrina, it didn’t touch it at all. I still stood in the doorway of that bedroom in January and thought this ends too. I have had the actual miracle.