I made carnitas and fresh rice.” And then, catching Chloe’s small anxious face, he crouched down to her level.

“And two whole chicken legs, just for you.”

Chloe looked up at me, uncertain, as though she needed permission to believe it.

“Both of them?

For me?”

“Both of them, baby,” my father said.

“And if you want another, we’ll buy a whole tray of them tomorrow.”

That night I sat and watched my daughter eat — really eat, without checking anyone else’s plate first, without flinching at a raised voice that never came, without measuring whether she was allowed — and I understood, watching her, how much fear I had spent five years teaching myself to call normal.