She could smell a comforting lie from across a room, even at six, and if I told her everything was fine when it wasn’t she trusted me less, not more — so with Tess I learned to tell the truth, carefully, at whatever age-appropriate size she could carry it, because she would rather have a hard truth she could rely on than a soft one she couldn’t.

Three girls, one man, and the daily project of being exactly the right kind of father to each of them without shortchanging the other two.

I did not always manage it.

But I have come to think that the trying — the constant, attentive, imperfect trying to meet each of them as the specific person she was — may be most of what fathering actually is.

Chapter 7 — The Seventy-Hour Weeks

I am not going to pretend it was easy, because it wasn’t, and because pretending would cheat the three of them out of what they actually did by surviving it alongside me.