And my twin nieces, Ava and Lily, who had been my sister’s girls, and who had become mine on the worst day of my life, when she died and left two small children looking up at me with her eyes.

I did not hesitate.

There was nothing to hesitate about.

You take the children.

You just take them, and you figure out the rest as you go, because the alternative is unthinkable and love does not stop to do arithmetic.

I want to be honest about what taking them cost, because it matters to everything that came after.

It cost nearly everything I had, and I would pay it again a thousand times over, but it was not nothing, and I will not pretend it was.

Overnight I went from a mother of one to a mother of three, in the middle of a grief so large I could not see around it, with two little girls in my house who woke screaming for a woman who was never coming back and whom I could not, no matter how I held them, replace.