Kim Valentine

Kim Valentine is Emma Valentine’s older sister, the person who raised her after their parents died, and the midwife who helped deliver Emma’s son. Her life is shaped by care made practical: setting aside her own education, taking legal responsibility for Emma, and later bringing her professional skills into her sister’s family. That sustained devotion does not resolve every conflict. When Emma disappears, Kim helps her leave, an act whose reasons remain unstated but whose consequences expose the competing claims of family loyalty.

Identity and Background

Kim was eleven years older than Emma. Their parents died when Emma was five, and the sisters’ childhood changed abruptly: they spent five days in hospital for smoke inhalation and then entered foster care. They lived with a couple named Nathan and Pauleen; Emma remembered Pauleen’s oatmeal cookies. Kim later recounted the fire to Emma, including their father’s return into the burning house after looking back at the children. The sisters’ surviving memories of their parents therefore include both the fact of their loss and an unresolved image of their father going back inside.

When Kim turned eighteen, she became Emma’s legal guardian. Rather than go directly to Jefferson College of Health Sciences in Roanoke, where she had been accepted, she found local work and raised her sister. Emma remembered the small geography of their life after the deaths: home, school, and the South County Library, twenty minutes away in Roanoke. Kim’s postponement lasted until Emma had graduated from high school and begun at UVA; only then did Kim go to Jefferson to study nursing. Their family relationship was thus built not only on kinship but on a long period in which Kim took responsibility for Emma’s daily life and future.

Emma later named a librarian, Ms. Rook, as another adult who had helped raise her almost as much as Kim. That comparison gives Kim’s role a particular measure: she was not simply a guardian by legal designation, but the central person in Emma’s childhood care. The novel’s account of their shared past also makes clear that this responsibility began while Kim herself was young, after both sisters had endured the loss of their parents and a period in foster care.

From Pediatric Nurse to Midwife

Kim first worked as a pediatric nurse and later made what the narrative describes as a midlife conversion to midwifery. She became an outspoken advocate for home birth, discussing it with friends, former coworkers, cousins, and even telemarketers. When Emma became pregnant, Kim’s support mattered especially because other women in Emma’s life, including Lillian Kagwa, reacted with fear to the plan for natural childbirth. Kim alone among them backed the decision; she was not just an advocate but Emma’s older sister and chosen midwife.

In 2011, Apollo Kagwa and Emma met Kim at the Mahayana Buddhist Temple in Chinatown after agreeing to have her attend the birth. The setting was a tourist attraction rather than a religious home for any of the three, but it became the place where they made the arrangement. Kim had never had children of her own. The narrative sets that fact beside her experience raising Emma: becoming an aunt to Emma’s child would be a milestone, while midwifing her sister’s birth extended a caregiving relationship that had begun in childhood.

When Emma went into labor, Apollo called Kim as Emma continued walking through the city. Kim was at a movie and initially asked him to stop shouting; once she realized she was on speaker, she called out encouragement to Emma and said she was on her way. The connection then failed. The brief call conveys both the practical urgency of the birth and the intimacy of Kim’s role: she addresses Emma directly, not only as the trained attendant but as the sister who had stood beside her through earlier crises.

After Brian Kagwa’s birth, Kim came to the apartment with a medical bag and groceries. Lillian arrived with prepared food, and together they entered the bedroom where Emma was struggling to get the baby to latch. Kim took Brian to check him and hold him as his aunt, while Lillian comforted Emma. Kim’s work therefore continued beyond delivery into the first days of feeding and recovery. Her professional care and family affection are presented in the same action, without treating them as separate duties.

Sisterhood and Postpartum Crisis

As Emma’s return to work and the demands of caring for a newborn accumulated, the sisters’ earlier history gave Kim a way to understand the present. Six months into a period of severe sleep deprivation, Kim arrived at Emma’s apartment with her medical bag and purse. She had to ring for a long time before Emma answered, and Emma’s flat, sleepwalking tone made clear to Kim that her sister was deeply depleted. Kim recognized the seriousness of the change, though she also found it different to encounter such exhaustion in her own sister rather than in a client.

Kim approached Emma carefully. At the playground, she walked beside her sister while Emma carried a heavy bag of chains, and avoided asking directly about the chains or the alarming circumstances surrounding them. Instead, she began telling Emma the story of the day their parents died. Recalling the event let the sisters return to a shared history without making Kim’s care depend on an immediate explanation from Emma. The account reaches the aftermath as well as the fire itself: hospital treatment for smoke inhalation, five days in hospital, and foster care with Nathan and Pauleen until Kim turned eighteen.

Emma also confessed that Brian seemed like the child she had given birth to and yet, at times, felt like someone else. Kim answered by linking Emma’s fear to exhaustion, her early return to work, and the loss of her own parents as a baby. She reassured her sister that such fears did not make Emma uniquely broken and recalled that she had spoken about mothers experiencing similar distress before Emma began medication. The reassurance is grounded in both Kim’s professional knowledge and her intimate knowledge of Emma’s history: she recognizes how present fear can draw force from an earlier bereavement.

Emma then explained that Brian’s room had a fire escape and that the security gate did not feel sufficient. She wanted to wrap chains around it but expected Apollo to object. Kim offered to tell him that the chains were doctor’s orders and to help install them. The sisters carried the bag home together. The gesture is small but consequential: Kim does not dismiss Emma’s fear or force her to defend it, instead helping turn it into a concrete measure of protection. Later, Apollo invoked Kim’s earlier counsel while trying to reach Emma, telling her that she was not alone and that the family could address what had happened. Kim’s understanding had become part of the support available to Emma even when Kim was not present in the scene.

Debt, Departure, and Narrative Role

Years later, Apollo sought Kim out to repay what he owed her for her work as midwife. He brought a postdated check for ten thousand dollars and said that Emma had delivered the baby herself, with the two of them managing together, though he credited Kim and the childbirth class with preparing them. Kim responded that they had not ultimately needed her in the way she had expected. When Apollo mentioned that he had never learned Emma’s third wish, Kim embraced him and began to tell him something. She said it had not been supposed to happen this way, but the exchange ended without explaining what she meant. She accepted the check, kissed Apollo’s cheek, and left.

That same morning, Kim appeared again at the South Street Seaport, where Emma waited for a water taxi. A woman came through the crowd, embraced Emma, then led her to the line and used two passes to board with her. Apollo recognized the woman as Kim, whom he had just seen in Chinatown and paid. Patrice Green and Dana recognized her too, but neither looked at Apollo. The narrative does not give Kim’s explanation or specify what she knew about Emma’s plans. It does establish her action: she helped Emma leave Manhattan, even as Apollo watched the boat pull away.

This departure complicates, rather than erases, Kim’s earlier loyalty to Apollo and Emma as a couple. She had trained and attended to them as a family, accepted payment for her care, and shared a long history with both of them. At the moment of Emma’s flight, however, she acted with her sister. Her final intervention recalls the guardianship that defined their relationship from adolescence onward: Kim once put her education on hold to raise Emma, and now she helps Emma escape, though the book leaves the reasons and full terms of that choice unresolved. Across the novel, Kim’s importance lies in this continuity of care and in its limits: the care is tangible, sustained, and deeply informed by shared loss, but it does not make the sisters’ choices transparent to everyone who loves them.