It assumes that a father is a thing every child is owed, in the abstract, regardless of the man attached to it, and that I withheld one.

But I did not withhold a father from Lily.

Mike withheld himself, in writing, before she was born, and what I did afterward was decline to summon back, out of a sense of obligation, a man who had already proven how he treats the people who depend on him.

There is a difference between a child who has lost something and a child who never had a hole to begin with, and Lily is the second kind.

She does not carry an absence, because I did not raise her around one.