A person who will love you no matter how you treat her is, to a certain kind of family, not a treasure but a convenience — a resource that arrives free and replenishes itself and asks for nothing, and so is valued exactly as much as anything free and inexhaustible is ever valued, which is to say not at all.

Every night I sat by Tristan’s bed, every hour I spent in that emergency room, every meal I cooked and uniform I ironed and small crisis I absorbed without complaint, taught them the same lesson, over and over: that my devotion was a law of nature, like gravity, requiring no gratitude and admitting no limit.

I had thought I was proving my love.

I was only teaching them that it was safe to spend it without counting.