For fifteen years I had believed that being strong for my girls meant standing alone, carrying every burden by myself, never letting them see how heavy it was.

I had thought that was what a good father did.

I had been wrong.

Strength, I understood now, is not carrying everything alone until it crushes you.

Sometimes strength is the harder thing: it is letting the people you spent your whole life protecting stand beside you at last, and take some of the weight, and help you carry it home.

Laura had walked out of a closing door fifteen years before, and left me with six daughters and all the weight in the world.