And a man stepped out into the light and put his hand on my daughter’s head.

I was a hundred and thirty yards away, behind a fence, in October light, and I still knew him instantly, because I had looked at his photograph on my wife’s dresser every morning for nine years.

It was Antonia’s father.

Gerald Rask had died of a heart attack in Naples, Florida, in the February before I met his daughter.

I had been told that on our fourth date, in a wine bar in the West Village, by a woman who cried a little and apologized for crying.

I had been told it again, in more detail, by her mother.