You don’t learn how to make a light for somebody until you’ve needed one that badly.”

Hazel leaned her head against my arm, the same way she used to when she was two years old and the world was still whole.

“You never stopped being our big brother, Bernard,” she said.

“And now look.

You’re theirs, too.”

I closed my eyes and listened to it — the wind in the pines, the fire ticking down, and behind it, through the walls, the deep even breathing of a house full of children asleep and safe under one roof.

Every road that led here ran through heartbreak; there was no version of this that didn’t.

But sitting in the starlight between the family I’d lost and the family I’d built, I understood the one true thing I’d come all this way to learn.

Love doesn’t just outlast the storm.

If you let it, and if you’re stubborn enough, it goes back in and builds the house again.