These were not punishments I inflicted.

They were simply the shape of reality reasserting itself, once I stopped holding it back — the natural resting level of three lives that had been artificially inflated, for three years, by me alone.

Chapter 18 — What They Never Understood

I have thought, in the quiet months since, about what exactly Marguerite and Bristol never understood, because it was the root of everything, and it is a misunderstanding a great many entitled people share.

They believed that my generosity was a fact about the world, like gravity — permanent, reliable, requiring nothing from them, owed to them by the simple circumstance of our being family.

They did not experience my paying for their lives as a gift, because a gift can be withheld, and it had never once occurred to them that this one could be.