Any reasonable person says: I tried, he wouldn’t listen, I have a son to think about, I am not going to keep throwing myself against a locked door.

And Emily is a reasonable person.

But she was also my daughter, and somewhere under the exhaustion and the fear and the fresh proof of how little I’d valued her word, she made a different calculation — she decided that her father, however foolish, however lost, was worth one more try, even now, even bleeding.

So she did the hardest thing.

She set aside her own wounded pride, and her very reasonable certainty that I would fail her again, and she staked everything on the slim chance that the sight of her own child might reach me where her voice had not.