But there is a difference between a wrong done out of selfishness and a wrong done out of love turned inside out, and Marcus’s was the second kind.

He hurt me by trying, with everything in him, to spare me.

And I have found that you can hold both of those truths at once, the wrong of it and the love of it, without either one cancelling the other.

That is most of what forgiving someone actually is, I have come to think: not deciding they did no harm, but deciding to hold the harm and the love together, and to let the love be the larger of the two.

Chapter 15 — Clara