It is eating breakfast at the same table every morning, so that a child has a hundred low-stakes daily opportunities to mention, in passing, that something is wrong, without having to work up the enormous courage it takes to make a formal report.

My daughters did not need me to be a hero who bursts through doors.

They needed me to be present, ordinarily, constantly, boringly present, so densely woven into the fabric of their daily lives that no cruelty could operate in the gaps, because there would be no gaps.

The tragedy of my old life was not that I failed to show up for some crucial moment; it was that I was absent for all the small moments, the accumulated ordinary hours in which a child’s trust is either built or eroded, in which they learn either that their father is a reliable presence they can turn to or an important stranger they must not bother.

I had made myself the stranger.