"Not until her mother died." Jefferson wasn't going to sugarcoat anything to try and lighten his already dim character that he was sure everyone thought on him. He wasn't under any illusions that he was an upstanding man. The only person whose opinion mattered was Grace's, heaven knows he'd killed his chances there too. "Then I didn't really have a choice."
Actually he did. There were plenty of orphaned children in the Forrest and Grace deserved so much better than him, but Jefferson did love his little girl very much. At the time he'd just been young and it was safe to say he still was a very selfish person. The migration to selfish until it came to his daughter just hadn't quite happened until then.
"They're used for a lot of things back at home. Not a lot of people know where to get them or how to use them. Or they're too lazy to go searching themselves. Grace was like a bloodhound. She could find a patch of mushrooms in the snow."