Love Is Something You Protect

That love is not something you buy, and it is not something you inherit.

It is something you protect.” I have carried those words with me every single day since.

They are the truest thing anyone ever said to me.

Love is not something you buy or inherit; it is something you protect.

I have thought about that sentence from every angle in the years since, and it only grows truer.

Arthur had spent a long life surrounded by people trying to buy love with attention and inherit it by blood, and it had all turned to ash in his hands, his own children reduced to circling heirs.

And then, at the very end, love had come to him from an entirely unexpected quarter, from a hired nurse and her sick little boy, people with no claim on him and no reason to give him anything, and it had come precisely because it was not bought and not inherited but simply, freely, given, and then guarded.