The grandmother I had always had by blood became, through a hundred and ninety miles and a month of standing beside her, something I had earned and been given and chosen and been chosen by — a real family, made not of genetics but of the thing genetics cannot manufacture and cannot guarantee, which is simply, and only, love shown up and proven.

I do not say blood is thicker than water anymore.

I say what my grandmother taught me, which is truer: that love is thicker than blood, and that it is the only thing that ever actually was.

Chapter 20 — It’s Ours, and It’s Home

I moved into the guest suite of the house not long after, taking a remote position with my firm so that my grandmother would never have to face another predatory relative alone.

And over the months that followed, the house on the hill came back to life.