He had looked into those eyes on the day she was born.

“Sidonie.”

There is no word for what a father feels in the instant he finds, alive, the child he spent six years believing he had cremated.

It is not joy, or not only joy; joy is too clean a word for it.

It was every feeling at once, all of them too large for his body — a grief for the six years, a rage at what had been done, a terror at her condition, and underneath all of it a love so violent and total that it nearly took his legs.

He had stood at a memorial and grieved this woman.