I want her to be free of all of it.

I want her to grow up believing, simply and completely, that the world contains a right way to answer even the worst things, and that her father took it, not as a heroic act of self-denial, but as the natural and obvious thing a good man does.

I want the lesson without the debt.

So I keep the cost invisible, the way I kept the buried man invisible her whole life, because the whole point of both was always the same: to hand my daughter an ordinary, unburdened, well-lit life, free of the darkness I came from.

She got to be brave in an alley because she had never been taught that the world required darkness.