A daughter is a person you sit with.

And Maya did not need me to be her prosecutor, or her advocate, or even, in that moment, her rescuer.

She needed me to be, simply and unglamorously, her father: to make her breakfast, to ask about her day, to sit on the couch beside her and watch something silly, to be a steady, undramatic, daily presence who wanted nothing from her at all.

That was the thing my mother had convinced her no longer existed.