I did nothing wrong in marrying Arthur.

I would do it again tomorrow, and a hundred times after, and I have never once let anyone shame me for it, because there is no shame in a mother saving her son, only in the world that made saving him cost so much.

The one thing I could not do was tell Caleb why.

He was eight, and gravely ill, and I would not lay the weight of it on him, would not let him grow up believing that his mother had sold some piece of herself to buy his heartbeat.

So I told him only that a good man was going to help us, and that he should be polite and wear his nice clothes, and he accepted this the way children accept the strange doings of adults.