Grace absorbed this the way she absorbed everything, quietly, seriously, turning it over.

Behind her, my parents sat shattered by the very same truth I was gently unfolding for a child, and the strangeness of that, of telling the story to my daughter and my parents at once, to the one who had never heard any of it and the two who had spent ten years not letting themselves think about it, was almost more than I could bear.

I was, in that moment, speaking to three different kinds of ignorance at once.

Grace knew nothing, and I was building her father in her mind out of words, from the ground up.