Always.” Chloe looked at him for a long moment, weighing it, the way she weighed everything, and then something in her face settled, some fear that had been living there for a long time letting go at last.

Then she nodded, and she tucked the red box away carefully inside her little purse.

That question, will you still be my dad if she gets mad, is the one that still keeps me up at night, three years later, because of how much it revealed about the interior world my daughter had been living in.

To an adult, the fear behind it is almost incomprehensible.

Of course Caleb would still be her dad; his love for her was the most fixed and reliable thing in her life.