He explained it to her, his unborn daughter, more fully and more plainly than he had explained it to anyone, because he wanted her, someday, to understand.

He said that if he could not watch her grow up, he wanted something good to come from the life he had been given.

He wrote it out, all the ways: that perhaps another parent would have more time with a child.

That perhaps another husband would have more mornings with his wife.

That perhaps another daughter, somewhere, would have more years with her father, the way Cecelia would not.

That perhaps another family would get one more birthday, one more Christmas, one more ordinary Tuesday morning together — the small, unremarkable, infinitely precious moments that he and I and Cecelia would not get.