There is a version of this story the world would have found more satisfying, and it is an uglier one — the version where I use my daughter as a spear.

Where I show up at prenatal appointments to taunt him.

Where I put his name on her birth certificate specifically so I could then wield it, drag him into her life and then out of it, make her existence a weapon aimed at the soft place under his ribs.

People would have understood that.

Some would have cheered it.

He had earned it, they would say.

And they would not have been entirely wrong about what he had earned.