My Blythe would never have to explain, on a school form or a job application or a first date, why she shared a surname with a convicted man.

She carried my name, the name he had spat like an insult, and it was the cleanest inheritance I could have given her.

Sometimes the cruelest thing a person tries to do to you turns out, by the strange accounting of consequences, to be a gift they did not mean to give.

He aimed to diminish her.

He handed her the better name instead.

Two months after that, a request came through his public defender.