And Alex, his throat tight, turned back to his daughter, and snapped the blue track piece into place exactly where she had pointed.

He would remember that moment, the small unremarkable weight of Clara on his back, the casual authority of her instruction about the track, the word Daddy dropped into the middle of it without any fanfare at all, for the rest of his life, as the moment he knew he had made it back.

And what struck him most, replaying it, was that it had come exactly the way Elena had always insisted it must: unforced.

He had been forbidden, from the very beginning, from calling himself Daddy, from asking for it, from prompting it, from doing anything that might place the word in a child’s mouth before the child was ready to put it there herself.