Or because you never actually wanted us?”

Arthur said nothing.

He looked at his fifteen-year-old daughter, who had just asked him the truest and most devastating question a child can ask a parent, and he had no answer for her, and his silence was the answer, and Chloe heard it, and I saw something close, quietly and permanently, behind my daughter’s eyes.

Cami, my second, looked down at her shoes.

Sophia pressed her lips together.

And Maya, my youngest, only six, pressed her small face into the side of my coat and held on.