Tess was maybe fourteen, and she came to me — Tess, who never came to anyone, who handled things herself as a matter of principle — and she asked me, in the flat careful voice she used when a question mattered too much to let it sound like it mattered, why her real father had left.

Not me.

Him.

And I had to decide, in about two seconds, what to say to a fourteen-year-old about the man who had put her on a doorstep.

I could have made him a villain; it would have been easy, and she’d half have wanted it, because a villain is simpler to be angry at than a broken man is to grieve.

Instead I told her the truth as gently as I could carry it.