Last summer, a woman saw me walking my daughter Ella along the beach at the Outer Banks. It was past sunrise, the breeze picante with salt and sea vapor. The waves labored quietly, laying down their crosswise sheets of ocean to keep a firm walkway upon the verge.

This woman, she stopped us to say how lovely it all was: How lucky we all were to be there enjoying it, what with all that was going on in the world. Her eyes turned vaguely inland. Beyond the dunes, beyond the million dollar homes heaped upon the sightline, people suffered. Wars raged. Refugees died on makeshift boats to reach shores like these.

And I thought. I felt, this isn’t right. I don’t want to live in the dreams of the suffering. And if this sleepy luxury is my inheritance to this child, if only to conjure some sense of a paradise beyond, then it is a false one, one that I can neither give nor guarantee.

But that’s too much to tell a five-year-old, or even a kindly old woman on the strand. So I said nothing and continued on with the girl, hand-in-hand.