I only knew that my niece deserved a soft blanket, and that I got to be the one to buy it, and that this fact, small as it was, had already begun to remake me.

Arthur stopped a few feet away, and for a moment he could not seem to move any closer, as though the child were something too sacred and too painful to approach, the living proof of a sister we had failed and a niece we had never known.

Then he took one step, and another, and reached out.

Chapter 17 — She Looks Just Like Evelyn

Arthur reached out with a trembling hand and, very gently, with one fingertip, touched Maya’s tiny forehead, as though he needed to confirm through touch that she was real.