It felt, instead, oddly heavy, and sad, and tired — the specific melancholy of watching a thing you once loved reveal, completely and publicly, that it was never what you needed it to be.

Because whatever else Arthur Sterling was, he was my father, and some small, stubborn, hopeful part of me had spent thirty-two years wishing he would turn out to be someone who loved me, and watching him collapse in that ballroom was, among other things, the death of that hope.

There would be no version of the story in which he became a good father.

This was who he was, all the way down, laid bare at last for four hundred people to see: a man who would rather push his daughter into a fountain for a laugh than ever once make room for her at his table.