William, Edmund, and Anna knew, somewhere deep in the place where we know things that we cannot say aloud, that they had never lived in the sort of home one reads about in stories—one of warmth and affection and certainty in the knowledge that someone believes you hung the moon. The grandmother had provided for them. When they were small, before they’d been sent off to boarding school, there had been kind nannies. Miss Collins had always been dear and affectionate. But affection is not the same thing as proper family love. This sort of love, the children knew only from one another—and from
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