They saw me coming, and all three of them came down off the stage at a run, black gowns and gold tassels and tears, and they hit me all at once like a hurricane, and I got my arms around the three of them and pulled them in so tight I could not tell where one of my daughters ended and the next began.

Twenty-two years came out of me in one long ragged breath against their shoulders — the fear and the exhaustion and the three-in-the-morning terror and all of it, all of it turned somehow, over the years, into this.

“You didn’t have to do that,” I kept saying into their hair.

“You didn’t have to do that, girls.”

“Yes, we did, Dad,” Tess said, her arms locked around my neck, her voice fierce and certain the way it had been fierce and certain since she was four.

“Every single day of our lives, you chose us.