There is a temptation, for a parent who has sacrificed something enormous and invisible for a child, to want the child to know — to want credit, acknowledgment, the record set straight.

I have felt that temptation.

Some part of me wants my daughter to understand that on the worst night of her life, her father held the power to destroy the people who hurt her, and chose not to, and that the choosing cost him more than she can imagine.

But I will never tell her, and here is why.

If she knew, then my restraint would become, however subtly, a burden I had placed on her — a debt, a thing she owed me, a heaviness in our love.

And I do not want my daughter to carry one ounce of weight from what her father used to be, or from what he refused to become on her behalf.