My mother spent her whole life believing he had abandoned us for something better, something worth being a secret for, and I wanted to see if it was true.

I wanted to look at the thing he decided was more important than his own daughter, and find out if it was as cold as she always said, or if there was something real in it that might explain — not excuse, but explain — why he did what he did.

I understood her then, more than I wanted to.

She had not come to forgive our father, or to condemn him; she had come to the far humbler and more human question of whether he had been worth it — whether the thing he chose over her had been grand enough to make the abandonment make some kind of sense.

It is a question every discarded child must eventually ask about whatever took their parent away, and she had been brave enough, or desperate enough, to come and look at the answer with her own eyes rather than live her whole life wondering.”