He did not force it.

He did not ask her to call him Dad.

He did not demand affection he had not earned or expect the three years he had missed to be handed back to him.

To Lily, for a long time, he was simply Damian — the very tall man who built elaborate fortresses out of cardboard boxes, who did outrageous voices while reading her bedtime stories, who never once got tired, no matter how many times she explained it, of hearing exactly what was happening in each of her drawings.

One afternoon, on the porch, Lily looked up from her coloring book.

“Why do you stay here so much?”