And now it was gone, lifted off all six of us at once, and in its absence I could hear my daughters laughing in a way that sounded different, freer, as though they too had been holding a breath they didn’t know they were holding.

I looked at Ramona, seven years old and already so careful, and I made her a promise in my head.

She would grow up now in a house where nobody was waiting for her to be someone else.

She would never again watch a parent’s face fall at the news of a sister.

And Leander — my longed-for, dark-haired boy, who had done nothing in his first hours on earth but be born the wrong color for his father’s fear — Leander would grow up never knowing he had been, for two days, a suspect in his own family.

He would only know a mother who fought for him and four sisters who adored him.