And he had chafed at that rule, in the early days, had wanted so badly to hear it that the prohibition had felt like a cruelty.

He understood now that it had been the opposite of cruelty.

Because a word like that, extracted or coached or requested, means nothing; it is a performance, a compliance, a thing given because it was asked for.

But a word like that, arriving on its own, slipping out of a child in the middle of a sentence about a race-car track, unbidden and unnoticed even by the child who said it, is the realest thing in the world.

Clara had not decided to call him Daddy.