For a moment, when Fiona was born, those traits had seemed like a curse, a mark of the darkness reaching into our new life to claim her.

Luca looked down at our sleeping daughter, and I watched him take the eyes, and the dimple, and the mark, and everything they had once threatened, and set all of it down, gently, for good.

His face, looking at her, held nothing but pure, unshakeable warmth and peace.

“Maybe,” he said, and squeezed my hand, and smiled back at me, the free and easy smile of a man with nothing left to hide and nothing left to fear.

“But she has our future.”