I had a job to do down there, and the job was loving you, and I never once called in sick.” I have thought many times since that most fathers who are free and present and healthy do not love their children with a fraction of the deliberateness my father brought to loving me from inside a hole in the ground.

The love was not a feeling that happened to him.

It was a thing he did, on purpose, every day, for twenty-six years, as an act of will against the dark.

I did not know a person could love like that until I met the man who had been doing it for me my whole life without my knowing he was alive to do it.

Chapter 21 — Auggie’s Question

My son, Auggie, knew almost none of it, and that was deliberate.