Sometimes people try to charge you for it.

But that isn’t real love.

That’s just a bill with a bow on it.”

The Freedom Fund was, I understood as I set it up, my answer to the black notebook — a deliberate one, the mirror image of my father’s ledger.

He had kept a book in which love was recorded as debt, every gift to a child secretly a loan, every dollar a lien.

I would keep a book too.

But in mine, the same money that had once flowed out of me as ransom — the price of a place at a table that never wanted me — would flow instead into a future that no one could ever invoice.

My father’s ledger tallied what his children owed him.

My ledger tallied what I freely gave my child and would never, under any circumstances, ask him to repay.

Same act.