We’re a family.”

And I remember being pleased with myself.

I remember the exact texture of being pleased with myself, in a booth, about having said a warm firm fatherly thing to a teenager who was being a teenager.

And she said “okay” and we talked about something else and she never mentioned it again.

Never.

Not once, for three years.

And in a car in January 2026 my twenty-one-year-old daughter said: “I had it all worked out.

I’d looked up the school district and everything.