I did not know, in those years, that Grace’s relentless, gentle wanting-to-understand was the very thing that would eventually save us all.

I saw it, mostly, as a difficulty, a pressure I had to keep managing, a set of questions I had to keep softly turning aside.

I did not see it for what it was, which was a kind of homing instinct, a pull toward the buried truth of her own origins that would not be denied forever.

Children are like that, I have come to believe.

They can feel the shape of the things the adults around them are not saying, the holes in the story, and some of them, the brave and stubborn ones, will not stop reaching toward those holes until someone finally fills them in.