C ONNOR CAME BACK TO LIFE on the rocky beaches of Aldiz. It was slow but steady, like a seed sprouting. She liked playing Scrabble with Celia. As she’d promised, she ate dinner with me every night, sometimes even coming down to the kitchen early to help me make tortillas from scratch or my mother’s caldo gallego. But it was Robert she gravitated toward. Tall and broad, with a gentle beer belly and silver hair, Robert had no idea what to do with a teenage girl at first. I think he was intimidated by her. He was unsure what to say. So he gave her space, maybe even more of a wide berth. It was Connor who reached out, who asked him to teach her how to play poker, asked him to tell her about finance, asked him if he wanted to go fishing. He never replaced Harry. No one could. But he did ease the pain, a little bit. She asked his opinion about boys. She took the time to find him the perfect sweater on his birthday. He painted her bedroom for her. He made her favorite barbecue ribs on the weekends. And slowly, Connor began to trust that the world was a reasonably safe place to open your heart to. I knew the wounds of losing her father would never truly heal, that scar tissue was forming all through her high school years. But I saw her stop partying. I saw her start getting As and Bs. And then, when she got into Stanford, I looked at her and realized I had a daughter with two feet placed firmly on the ground and her head squarely on her shoulders. Celia, Robert, and I took Connor out for dinner the night before she and I left to take her to school. We were at a tiny restaurant on the water. Robert had bought her a present and wrapped it. It was a poker set. He said, “Take everybody’s money, like you’ve been taking mine with all those flushes.” “And then you can help me invest it,” she said with devilish glee. “Atta girl,” he said.