She did not know she had been abandoned.

She did not know she had been fought for.

She only knew, in the wordless way of a four-month-old, that a warm and constant person was near, that she was held, that she was safe, and her small hand reached for that certainty even in sleep.

It struck me that this was the whole of what I owed her, and the whole of what her father had refused to provide: to be the constant, the one who is simply there, reliably, in the dark, when the small hand reaches out.

He had not wanted the job.