But she was also, whatever else she was, the last living link to their grandfather Ambrose, the man who had thought enough of three children he’d never meet to protect them in his will — and there were stories only she could tell them, a whole half of themselves only she could hand them.

I was not going to let my grievance rob them of that too.

So I built the boundaries high and I kept the door, narrowly, open, and I made her earn every inch of what came through it.

That is the hardest kind of parenting there is, I think — the kind where you hold your own justified fury in one hand and your child’s future in the other, and you refuse to let the first one spend the second.

I do it for them.