She knew the adults were fighting about the baby, that her father had not come home, that her grandmother’s mouth was set in a hard line.

What she could not know was the poison in the specifics, and I would have given anything to keep it from reaching her.

This was the thing about Nicolas’s obsession that I found, in the end, unforgivable: it would not stay contained to the adults who had chosen this marriage.

It reached down into the lives of children who had chosen nothing, who wanted only to meet their baby brother, and it put a shadow over what should have been one of the purest joys of their childhood.

Ramona should have been allowed to lean over that bassinet in simple delight.

Instead she was standing in a living room thick with adult tension, sensing that her brother’s very belonging was somehow in question, filing it away with all the other things she was too young to name and too perceptive to miss.