If she gets mad?” And I watched my husband’s face come apart for a single instant — not because he had to think about the answer, but because it broke something in him that a seven-year-old had been made to wonder, had been taught by three years of a woman’s careful cruelty that a father’s love might be the kind of thing that could be revoked if a grandmother disapproved.

He got hold of himself.

He looked her dead in the eyes.

“I will always be your dad,” he said.

“Always.

No matter who gets mad, no matter what happens in this house or any other house, for the rest of my life and yours.

That is the one thing in this whole world that cannot change.” Holly looked at him.

And then she nodded, once, and closed her fingers around the red box, and tucked it away — and I understood that my daughter had just decided something, quietly, in her own time, the way she decides everything.