Part of me — the boy she raised — wanted to run after her and take it back, apologize, smooth it over the way I’d smoothed over everything my whole life.

But then I looked through the glass, and I saw Rosalie in the wheelchair with Edmund in her arms, both of them safe on the other side of a door I had finally learned to close, and the wanting stopped.

There are loyalties that cancel each other out.

A man cannot keep the peace with the person who tried to erase his child and also be the father that child deserves.

She had made me choose, years before I ever knew there was a choice to make, and I had just, standing in that corridor, made it.