I would be the thing that did not vanish.

When she woke in the night, I would be in the chair.

When she left for school, I would be at the door when she returned.

When she cried, I would come.

Not because presence is heroic — it is the opposite of heroic, it is quiet, repetitive, often boring — but because it is the one gift no one else can give in your place, and the one my daughter had been starving for far more than she had been starving for food.

I had spent ten years being absent and calling it provision.