What we built, in the year and the years after, was slower and truer than anything Rebecca had promised me.

I learned to listen to my daughter — really listen, not the performance of listening I’d done for decades while waiting for my turn to explain why she was wrong.

When Emily has a concern now, I sit with it, because I have seen with my own eyes what it costs when I don’t.

And Emily, for her part, learned that she could bring me things again, that the door was open, that warning her father would no longer cost her a piece of his love.

That is not a small repair.