“That’s what we’re here for, Dad,” Daisy said.

And there was something almost unbearably right about the fact that it was Daisy who said it, my youngest, the baby I had held in that hallway fifteen years earlier while her mother packed and left, the one who had no memory of Laura at all, only the fact of her absence and the constant present reality of me.

She had been nine months old at the closing door.

She was a young woman now, and she was standing in front of me telling her father that she and her sisters were there to help carry his weight, and the whole arc of fifteen years was in it, the baby who could give nothing then now grown into a woman who could give this.