Real care had grown in the space the contract made, the way a green thing will find its way up through a crack in the pavement, unbidden and unstoppable, indifferent to whether anyone planted it.

I had not married Arthur for love.

But I came to love him, in the particular way you love the people who stand beside you in your worst hour and do not leave, and I think he came to love us too, and neither of us was more surprised by it than the other.

Chapter 19 — The Coast

Some months later, we were living in a quiet villa on the coast, where the light came in off the water in the mornings and the air smelled of salt, and where I watched, every single day, the ordinary miracle that Arthur had bought for us.

Caleb, nine years old now, ran.