Peter and Lieve’s Father-Daughter Relationship

Peter and Lieve’s father-daughter relationship is built around a contradiction he cannot resolve: Lieve is the child he and Eva desperately hoped for, but she was conceived with a donor’s sperm, and Peter struggles to feel that she is his daughter. Her stillbirth makes that uncertainty inseparable from grief. The story traces a bond formed through expectation and care, interrupted before it can become an ordinary shared life, and remembered differently by Peter and Eva.

A hoped-for child and the limits of biology

Peter and Eva’s attempt to have a child begins with renewed hope. They try repeatedly, read possible signs of pregnancy into Eva’s nausea and changing body, and are repeatedly disappointed by negative Predictor pregnancy tests or bleeding after a faint second line. When they first seek help after a year, their doctor reassures them that infertility is not yet a reason for alarm and recommends tracking Eva’s basal temperature. The thermometer and temperature chart turn intimacy into a timed task: a rise of 0.2 degrees signals a likely ovulation, and sex is arranged around the timing.

The routine strains the marriage. Peter wants a child with Eva, but resists entering fertility treatment because he wants their child to come from love rather than a laboratory. He tells Eva that sex has become mechanical, concentrated into a few days each month, and that he misses their former closeness. Eva, whose longing for a child has become consuming, argues that they should find out whether a simple medical problem can be treated. They proceed to a gynaecologist: Eva’s examination and scans reveal no apparent obstruction, cysts, or inflammation, but two semen analyses show that Peter has too few sperm and that those present move poorly. The prospect of treatment makes the difference between his wish to father a child and his capacity to conceive one central to their relationship.

Lieve’s birth and Peter’s conflicted fatherhood

The effort to become parents involves nine IVF attempts, four ICSI treatments, and five KID procedures. Peter later describes the accumulated treatment and loss as something he could no longer watch Eva endure for the sake of his abnormal sperm. He also insists that the death of Lieve, whom he identifies as a donor’s child rather than biologically his, was a boundary they had reached. That distinction does not mean he was untouched by her arrival: it reveals how genetic paternity and emotional attachment remain painfully entangled for him.

After Lieve is stillborn, Peter and Eva dress her in the outfit they had bought together on a weekend in Maastricht. They wrap her in a blanket Eva’s mother made from pieces of baby clothes and bedding from Eva’s own infancy, then keep Lieve beside Eva’s hospital bed in a clear container. Peter and Eva study her face for resemblances to Eva and her family, touch her fingers and toes, and hold and kiss her cold body. They repeatedly smell her head in an effort to remember her scent. These acts of care give Peter a brief, physical encounter with fatherhood, but cannot supply the future they had imagined or settle his sense of whether Lieve was truly his child.

The grave as a site of distance and guilt

Peter and Eva choose to bring Lieve home and bury her, giving Eva a place she can visit. For a year she goes to the grave every day, sometimes twice in one day. Peter does not join her after the funeral. He avoids the grave because he sees it as a monument to his failure, while Eva’s repeated visits express the continuing closeness of her bond with their daughter. A passerby once finds Eva lying on the grave and checks that she is alive; the episode conveys the intensity of her mourning without making Peter’s absence any less consequential.

When Peter eventually visits, the grave is on the children’s section of the cemetery, beneath a white stone surrounded by blue forget-me-nots. He brings a white rose and notices the new pot of pink flowers Eva has placed between two plastic Disney dwarfs. He kneels, touches the cold stone, and admits to himself that he wants to feel love for a child who was not biologically his and never lived, but feels guilt instead. The setting sharpens his estrangement: nearby children’s voices carry across from the sports fields, a reminder of the ordinary childhood that Lieve never had.

A shared farewell, not a recovered certainty

At a later visit, Eva speaks to Lieve as her daughter and tells her that she and Peter must go on, while promising that Lieve remains in their hearts. She places a small stone angel among the flowers, saying it will watch over Lieve when she cannot be there. Peter admires Eva’s ability to believe that Lieve has become an angel and is somewhere around them, but cannot share that belief. The difference matters: their farewell is shared, but their ways of making meaning from the loss are not the same.

Eva kisses the stone, and Peter strokes her hair, holds her hand, and walks away with her. They do not cry as they leave; Peter feels lighter and notices the birds and sunlight among the trees. The gesture does not erase his earlier guilt or turn his relationship with Lieve into an uncomplicated one. It does, however, place him beside Eva in a moment of release, after a long period in which he had refused to accompany her to the grave.

Genetic paternity and the continuing family conflict

The later reproductive plans surrounding Eva and Steef throw Peter’s history with Lieve into sharper relief. Eva and Rebecca discuss arranging sex around Eva’s ovulation and allowing a condom to fail, a plan framed as a way to give Eva a chance at pregnancy. Steef later accuses them of taking his sperm without his consent. These events do not change Lieve’s parentage or establish what becomes of the later pregnancy; they extend the novel’s conflict over who has a claim to genetic fatherhood, who bears the bodily and emotional consequences of reproduction, and what makes someone a parent.

For Peter, Lieve’s place in that conflict remains unresolved. He loved the possibility of becoming a father and participated in welcoming and mourning her, yet he also names the donor as the source of the child and struggles to feel a bond he believes should be present. Eva’s continuing address to Lieve and Peter’s eventual walk away from the grave together show two different responses to the same daughter: one sustained through daily remembrance, the other marked by avoidance, guilt, and a tentative act of accompaniment.