Sebastian looked at his mother for a long time. I watched him do it — watched him look at her the way you look at something you have loved your entire life and are seeing clearly for the first time, the love and the clarity existing simultaneously without one canceling the other out.
“Did you mean it?” he said. “What you said in the garden on Sunday. To Mira.”
Edna looked at me briefly. Then back at Sebastian.
“Yes,” she said. “Every word.”
“Even knowing what you’d done fourteen months ago.”
“Especially knowing.” Her voice was very quiet. “Because by Sunday I had watched you walk through everything Julian threw at you and come out the other side of it holding her hand, and I understood that I had spent fourteen months trying to protect you from something that had already become the be
