It really was that simple, and that stubborn.

Everything else that happened later grew out of that one plain refusal to turn away.

Chapter 4 — The Shape of the Days

My husband worked long shifts, often up in Chicago, gone for stretches at a time, and so the daily shape of Fiona’s care fell to me and to the quiet rhythm the two of us built together in that house.

I had a young son in those years, too, so my days were a kind of braid — a child at the beginning of his life and a woman at the end of hers, and me in the middle, moving between them, carrying what each of them could not carry for themselves.