Four months after the wedding, Claire stood in the window of the master suite at six in the morning and watched the first snow of December fall on Manhattan and tried to locate the woman she had been on the morning she put on her sister’s dress.
She could still find Claire, the one who had stood in a church bathroom listening to her mother cry and chosen sacrifice over self because that was simply what she did. She could still find her but she felt further away every day, like a shore you could see but no longer quite reach.
The woman standing at this window had learned to fight for things. Not loudly, not dramatically, but with a particular quiet precision that had turned out to be more effective than anything louder might have been.
She heard Nathaniel move behind her, the soft sound
