Instead of rushing to her, picking her up, and whispering words of comfort, Ben had simply stopped and observed her actions. Her response to the actual level of physical pain he knew she was experiencing seemed excessive, and he wondered at the human inclination to overreact to stress on the body. It never occurred to him that she was merely frightened.

Before he could bring himself to the point of helping Caddie, Carol had come running from the house, drawn by the child’s cries. Seeing Ben standing a dozen feet from their injured baby, she’d fixed him with a look so utterly fierce, so filled with disgust and wonder, that he’d stepped back as if struck. Only then was he able to move forward, to walk briskly toward his daughter, now cradled in his wife’s arms and sobbing quietly, and inquire, “Is she all right?”

Carol had pulled Caddie back from his touch, as if he were a stranger, and taken the girl back into the house. When Ben entered a minute later, Caddie was happily chasing the dog, a foolish red and white spaniel called Hartley, around the living room. A small bandage covered her knee, and she seemed to have forgotten entirely what had moments before been the greatest calamity of her life.

Carol had said nothing, but her coolness betrayed her newfound understanding of Ben’s ineptitude as a father. He’d started to apologize, then stopped, unsure what he was apologizing for and unwilling to admit to a sin he couldn’t even name. But the evidence had been presented, and Carol, at least, had found him guilty.

Caddie, oblivious to her father’s failings, had continued to behave toward him as she always had. And he’d attempted to act in all ways as a father should toward his child. But eventually he’d accepted that something was wrong. He loved his daughter; that was never in doubt. But he didn’t feel this love as he knew others did. It didn’t radiate out from his heart and enfold him in golden warmth. He felt constantly in shadow.

Carol had tried to kindle the fire of emotion in him, striking at him as a person shivering from cold might dash a flint against a rock, praying for a spark. Failing at that, she’d resorted to quarreling. He remembered the last few years of their marriage as one long fight, marked only by the level of its intensity as one or the other of them tired of battle for a time.

He’d left when Caddie was seven. She’d been old enough to understand that he would no longer be a daily part of her world, and the day he’d put a suitcase and several boxes of books into the car, she’d burst into tears that too much reminded him of the day that things had begun to unravel. Once again, it had been Carol who’d tried to soothe her pain, this time without success.

In the nine years since, he’d spent less and less time trying to locate the flaw in himself that had resulted in the dissolution of his marriage. He and Carol forgot about the things that had brought them together, and now he thought of her as someone he knew once but only through accident of time and place, like a school friend or a neighbor from a former home. Caddie he thought of in more familial terms. He’d managed to maintain involvement in her life, albeit limited mostly to phone calls and occasional visits, both of which had decreased in frequency as she’d aged.