His daughter made him invincible.

And I felt it, holding him on that bed, the steel gone soft again now that the danger had passed, but the core of it permanent, transformed: my gentle husband had discovered, in the span of an afternoon, that there was something he loved more than he had ever feared anything, and it had set him free.

Chapter 15 — The Man I Married

For a long time, that afternoon, we did not speak.