He had not been there for a single day of it.

He had not been in the delivery room, had not seen them born premature and fighting in their incubators, had not held them for the first time, had not paced the floor at three in the morning with a colicky infant, had not heard a first word or witnessed a first step or been present for a single birthday.

Five years of first days, and he had spent every one of them in a childless penthouse, believing himself unable to be a father, mourning a fatherhood that had in fact been happening, in real time, a few miles away, without him.

That is a particular kind of grief, the grief of realizing that the thing you longed for existed all along and you simply were not there for it, that your loss was not fate but error, not tragedy but the consequence of a choice you made and a lie you were told.

And underneath the grief, sharper than the grief, was the terrible knowledge that time does not run backward.

Whatever came next, however the story resolved, he could never get those five years back.

A father can apologize for many things.

He cannot un-miss a childhood.

Alex sat on his expensive sofa in his silent, beautiful, empty apartment, and looked at four laughing children who had his eyes and his dimple and none of his presence in their memories, and he understood that he had done something for which there was no full repair, only, if he was very lucky and worked very hard for the rest of his life, a partial and hard-won mending.

The ground had shifted.

It would never shift back.

All he could do now was learn to stand on the new, harder ground, and begin.

Chapter 2 — The Years of Silence

To understand what he was looking at, and the enormity of what it meant, you have to understand the years that had come before, the years that had ended his marriage.