Willa, at fifteen, looks more like my sister than like anybody who is actually related to her in the direct line.

Beatriz came out of Maren Ostlund’s face wholesale.

The same heavy eyebrows, the same wide-set eyes, the same particular way of going still when she is angry, which is the single most unnerving thing I have ever had directed at me by another human being and which I saw first in a woman in 2004 and then in a nine-year-old in 2012.

And for about eight years, every single adult who came into our house said so.