He did not look at them because they were not, and had never been, real to him — because a child, like a wife, was to Victor only ever a figure in a calculation, and once the calculation had failed there was simply no reason left to turn his head.

I have decided that this is the one true thing my children should know about their father, when they are old enough to ask, and the only thing I will ever tell them: not that he was evil, though he was, but that he was empty, and that his emptiness was his own, and had nothing to do with them, and cost them nothing, because you cannot lose the love of a man who never had any love to give.

They did not lose a father in that courtroom.

They were only, finally, free of the absence of one.