“You were never, ever bad.

You were kids.

Somebody should have come, and it should have been me, and I will spend the rest of my life being the person who comes.

I’m here now.

I’m not going anywhere.

I promise you that on your dad.”

I have thought a great deal about that sentence of his, I thought that’s why nobody came, because it taught me the cruelest thing about what children do with abandonment, which is that they explain it.

A child cannot hold the idea that the adults failed; it is too frightening, it leaves them in a world with no floor.