Emma wiped her face with her sleeve. She looked at her mother with a terrible, searching expression, the expression of a child turning over a stone she has stepped on every day of her life and finding something underneath it she had never imagined.
"Would you ever do that to me?" she whispered.
"Do what?"
"Give me away. If things got bad. If you and Dad—" She could not finish.
Natalie did not reach out this time. She moved. She took her daughter into her arms, cream dress and wet face and all, and held her so hard that Emma made a small sound of protest and then stopped protesting and held on.
"Never," Natalie said into her hair. "Never. Do you hear me? Never, never, never. There is nothing in the world that would make me let go of you. And it's not because I love you more than her. I need you to understand that. It's not that I love you more. It's that I was a different person then, in a different life, and I made a choice that I thought was right, and I'll never know if it was. But you're not a choice I'm ever going to have to make. You're mine and I'm yours. Okay? That's not going to change."