[Kitty asks] “Do you know how that must feel, Nan, to be given your hearts’s desire, like that?”
I did. It was a wonderful feeling – but a fearful one, too, for you felt all the time that you didn’t deserve your own good fortune, that you had received it quite by error, in someone else’s place – and that it might be taken from you while your gaze was turned elsewhere. And there was nothing you would not do, I thought, nothing you would not sacrifice, to keep your heart’s desire once you had been given it….

—- From Sarah Waters’ “Tipping The Vevet” —-