Instead they were simple and light and joyful, six weeks of a daughter and a father just enjoying each other, unburdened, in the sun.

He engineered everything else about our reunion with painstaking care.

But that, the lightness, the innocence of it, was the one gift that could only come from my not knowing, and so he chose, at enormous cost to his own longing, to let me not know, so that the weeks could be pure.

Even his deception was a form of generosity.

I have thought about that word, deception, and whether it is even the right one for what he did, and I have decided that it is not, quite.