I was, in Noah’s eyes, more or less all-powerful, the way the adults who raise us always are when we are small.

And then he would ask me who his father was, and all my power would drain out through the floor, and I would be revealed, to him and to myself, as a woman who did not hold every answer after all, who held, in fact, a great blank where the most important answer should have been.

It is a hard thing to be a child’s whole world and still not be enough to fill the one hole that matters most to him.

Chapter 5 — Who Was My Dad?