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She wondered how Cole, or Lottie, or anybody could join her family--could ever be a aprt of the years that formed so many jokes and feuds and scars. All this talk of diamonds and futures, and it occured to her for the very first time that the person of Rachel Eklund was a fragile and wasting thing. Another evening with Cole, another less with Mama and Harold and Dalton and Mildred; another less of sharing together a single, secret personhood no one else could understand. A little less and a little less, and then she'd be another person--Rachel Windham, most likely, molding this piece of herself with that piece of Cole, augmented mostly by their each others': this joke he made, this fight she started; the two of them making the way for other breakable people. And Rachel thought, 'this is the way families go.
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