“Good.” It was a small exchange, ten seconds at most, but I have thought about it many times since, because it contained, in miniature, everything I had tried to teach my daughters about their worth.

The world would spend their whole lives telling them that certain people were owed certain things automatically, that blood created obligation, that a mother, however absent, was still a mother and still deserved a daughter’s deference.

And I wanted my girls to know, down in their bones, that this was not true, that respect and affection and the warmth of their embrace were theirs to give and not anyone’s to demand, that no accident of biology entitled a person to a place in their hearts they had not earned.

Daisy had asked, timidly, whether she had to hug a stranger who happened to be her mother.