Adele kept that letter — not as a keepsake, but as evidence of a specific human phenomenon she wanted never to forget: that some people will fill entire pages, will spend a thousand careful words, for the sole purpose of not saying the four that would actually cost them something.

She understood, reading it, that her father was not incapable of apology in the way some people are — tongue-tied, or proud, or simply bad with words.

Leopold Rutherford was a fluent man; he had talked his way into and out of a thousand rooms.

His failure to write I am sorry for rejecting Finn was not an inability.

It was a decision, renewed in every one of those four pages, because an apology of that kind would have required him to concede that he had been not merely mistaken but wrong — morally, unrecoverably wrong — about a newborn baby, and Leopold had built his entire self on the premise that he was never that.

The stroller and the imported clothes were the same evasion in a different currency.