A man does not get to abandon a child and then invoke her as a bond when the abandonment stops being convenient.

She was mine, mine to protect, mine to raise, mine to keep free of him and his family and their cage.

And what he had, in place of a daughter he had thrown away, was the natural and lawful result of his own choices, arriving now, all at once, on a public sidewalk among his scattered luggage.

That is what consequences are.

They are not revenge, and they are not cruelty.