For years they had spoken of Gabriela’s world with a delicate contempt — a preschool teacher, a walk-up in Brooklyn, no name, no connections, no portfolio — as though a life measured in soup and crayons and drawings on the refrigerator were something to escape, something beneath the dignity of a Marchand.

And I had absorbed it.

I had looked at exactly this kind of warmth and been trained to see poverty, to see a woman who could offer me nothing, to see a step down.

Standing in it now, I could not fathom how I had ever believed them.

This was not a lesser life than the one on my honeymoon itinerary.

It was an immeasurably greater one, and it took my breath away with shame to realize how thoroughly I had been taught to despise the only thing that had ever been real.