“She’s not a Rutherford,” Priscilla said to me once, watching Iris sleep. “Thank God. Neither is Carson, really. Neither am I. We’re just people who got caught in a family that cared about the wrong thing.” She touched the baby’s cheek. “Blood was never what made a family. I wish I’d been brave enough to know that at your age.”
“You know it now,” I said. “That’s why you’re here.”
I run my business still — it’s grown, actually, in the clear-headed, unburdened way things grow when you’re no longer pouring your energy into excusing someone. Iris comes to the office in a little carrier and charms my clients. I am raising her, with Priscilla beside me, to know one thing above all others, the exact opposite of everything Carson was taught.
You do not have to prove you belong to be loved. You simply are loved. Your worth was never a question of bl*od, or purity, or whose you are. It was settled the moment you existed.
