I’d sat all five of them down at the kitchen table and said that the three people from the bedtime stories were real, and alive, and coming to visit, and Owen had gone very quiet and then asked, with the deadly practicality of an eleven-year-old, whether that meant they might take me away now — whether finding my first family meant losing my second one.

And I’d had to stop and hold his face in both my hands and tell him no.

Never.

That a heart isn’t a house with a fixed number of rooms; that it just builds more.

That finding my sisters and my brother didn’t cost him a single thing, because love doesn’t run on subtraction.

I’m not sure he fully believed me until he saw it for himself, in the driveway, two weeks later.

Inside the house it was the usual joyful bedlam.