Lavender liked to imagine that her children were happy. That her boys had found their own ways to exist in the world, that they were soft and satisfied. This was as far as she would go. This was the reason she’d swaddled herself so forcefully in the isolation of Gentle Valley—here, she did not have to look. She did not have to wonder about the long tentacles of a choice she’d made when she was a different person, practically still a child. She did not have to see how the arms of that choice had reached into the world, the infinite number of realities they might have sculpted.
