He learned her.

That is the thing about Brandon that made me fall in love with him and marry him: he did not accept my daughter as a condition of having me.

He chose her, separately, fully, as her own person.

The morning of that Christmas, before we walked up Gene’s front steps, he’d noticed a scuff on Holly’s right shoe, and he had knelt down in the snow in his good trousers and wiped it clean with his thumb, and I heard him say to her, very quietly, “My sweet girl deserves at least one holiday where she feels completely chosen.” He said it like a wish.

He’d been saying that wish, in one form or another, for three years.