When Sarah died and left us in debt, my response was to go earn, to provide harder, to fix the problem with resources, because providing was the thing I knew how to do and the thing I believed a good father did.

And even now, in the wreckage, my first instinct had been to turn my rescue of Maya into another project of provision and problem-solving: build the case, gather the evidence, document the harm, win the legal fight.

It was the therapist who saw that I was about to make, in a new form, the exact same mistake I had made for five years: substituting the management of my daughter’s situation for the simple presence of a father in her life.

Because a case is a thing you build.