He sat down on her bed. Who is this girl? he asked himself. Where had she come from? He tried to remember her birth, thought for the first time in many years of the room where Carol, panting and chewing on bits of ice he fed to her from a paper cup, efficiently and without incident brought Caddie into the world. Then she had been in his arms, looking up at him with indignation and surprise as he counted her fingers and toes.

Sixteen years had changed her into something he didn’t recognize. Gone was the infant who had trusted him implicitly, also the five-year-old girl who had asked him whether Santa Claus was real and had believed him when he said that he was as real as air. Somewhere she had been replaced by this changeling, this shadow daughter who assumed that every word of his was a lie, every affection for her artificial.

When he’d announced his separation from Carol, his mother had begged him to reconsider for Caddie’s sake, brushing aside his argument that a child’s happiness didn’t necessarily outweigh that of her parents. She’d disagreed with such desperate fervor that he came to suspect that she spoke out of experience, and for the first time he questioned whether his parents’ marriage had been a happy one, although he couldn’t bring himself to ask either of them. Now he wondered if perhaps she hadn’t been right. Maybe, if he’d stayed, Caddie wouldn’t be unhappy now.

That theory, he told himself from some part of his brain still operating with scientific detachment, was flawed. There was no way of knowing what might have happened. The uncontrollable variables were too many, the number of possible outcomes immeasurable. Any conclusion reached through such an equation was unreliable and would have to be discarded.

He had never been a religious person. Even as a child he had found the notion of an omnipotent creator who punished his creations inconsistently for minor infractions of a vaguely defined moral code to be unthinkable to anyone with an ounce of sense. Later he had added such concepts as karma and the inevitability of fate to the list of beliefs unsupported by rational thought.

Now, however, he saw how a person might believe such things. Surely his actions had had an effect on Caddie. She had told him as much herself. And believing that maybe her current behavior could be explained away merely by pointing to something he’d done nine years earlier was easier than trying to unravel the complicated workings of a teenage girl’s mind.

But at some point didn’t his responsibility for her personal happiness end? Was it really his due that he should now suffer for something he’d done not out of selfishness but to preserve his own sanity? He heard his ten-year-old self assert angrily that it was not.