I held very still.

And then my daughter lifted her eyes to mine, at last, and asked me the question that broke whatever fragile future had still existed between Brenda and me, broke it cleanly and forever in a single sentence.

“Dad,” she whispered.

“Am I doing something bad by reminding you about Mom?” There are moments in a life that divide it into a before and an after, and that question was one of them for me.

My nine-year-old daughter, sitting on a laundry-room floor in the dress she had chosen so carefully, wondering aloud whether the simple fact of her existence, whether her love for her own dead mother, was a bad thing she should be ashamed of.