So I stopped asking whether I could, and I started, that very night, figuring out how.

And the how, it turned out, was not any single grand thing.

It was ten thousand small things, done over and over, for fifteen years.

It was learning to braid hair from videos, badly at first and then well.

It was six lunches packed before dawn.

It was recitals and parent-teacher conferences attended alone, sitting in the row of couples, the only single father in the room, learning not to mind the looks.

It was the endless arithmetic of stretching one income across eight lives, the coupons, the hand-me-downs cycled from triplet to triplet to Daisy.