I learned, raising them, that love is not one thing you feel three times.

It is three completely different things, shaped to three completely different people, and I got to feel all three at once, every day, for twenty-two years.

And they needed three different fathers, in a way — or rather, they needed the same father to learn to be three different things.

Rosie needed me soft; she needed me to sit with her feelings without trying to fix them, to let her cry all the way through a thing instead of hurrying her out of it, and it took me years to learn that with her the job was not to solve but to stay.

Frankie needed me delighted; she was a child who ran on being seen, who lit up when I laughed at her jokes and dimmed when I was too tired to, and so I learned to find the energy to be delighted by her even at the end of a seventy-hour week, because for Frankie my attention was food.

And Tess needed me honest.