But it was wrong, and it was a dangerous kind of wrong, because a person who believes their family is incomplete is a person desperate to complete it, and desperation is exactly the state in which we stop seeing clearly and start accepting whoever promises to fill the hole.

My belief in our incompleteness was the opening Pamela walked through.

She offered to make us whole, and I was so convinced we needed making-whole that I did not look closely enough at what she actually was.

And the truth, which my ten-year-old daughter grasped and I did not, is that a family is not made complete by its composition — by how many parents it has, or whether they are living, or whether there is a marriage certificate in a drawer.

A family is made complete by one thing only, and it is the thing Hannah named in front of her class: the daily, chosen, repeated act of the people who stay choosing each other.