Colonel Judd Latham — a logistics officer I met at Fort Meade, a steady, unhurried man who does not care about old fortunes or family names, who came into my life slowly and into my children’s lives more slowly still, on their terms, earning them one at a time the way you earn anything worth having.

He is not their father.

He would be the first to say so, and does.

He is only the man who stayed — who shows up, who asks the question before he acts, who is teaching Ira the constellations off the end of the dock.

Which is, I have come to believe, the entire and only definition of the word that matters.

I did not fall into Judd’s arms as a reward for surviving.