Identity

by Nora Roberts

“Grandmothers are designed to fuss over their grandchildren. It makes us happy. Don’t you want me to be happy?”

“I feel like such a failure, Gram.” “You’ll get over that, because you’re not and never have been. You had your world fall away from under you. I know what that’s like. I had mine fall away.”

I had a world again. A different one than I’d always planned, but a good world.”

“You’ll make new plans, build a new world.

Why change something when it suited you just fine? And change, he knew, rarely meant one thing. The dominoes kept tumbling.

I was afraid of him—not physically,” she said quickly. “Not that. Never, ever that. But of disappointing him, which I constantly did.

she looked and felt like a woman who’d found a kind of contentment she hadn’t expected.

“It seems to me that who you are isn’t someone you had to figure out, just someone you had to dig out. She was always there.”

When she went to work, he wandered around his house wondering how it was she filled so many spaces even when she wasn’t there.

“But he snuck up on me. Love snuck up on me.”

Wasn’t it miraculous, Morgan thought, to have someone love who you are, and never stop?

Life’s a series of leaps.