Sarah (Angel) and Alex Stafford

Sarah (Angel) and Alex Stafford’s relationship begins with Sarah’s idealized image of the father she has scarcely known and becomes a defining experience of rejection. Alex refuses to recognize her as his daughter; Sarah internalizes that repudiation as blame, and the wound echoes in her later conviction that she is unworthy of belonging or of giving Michael the family he wants.

A Father Seen Through a Child’s Hope

In New England in 1835, Sarah sees Alex as beautiful and princely, and feels pride at the prospect of meeting him. Dressed in her best blue frock and white pinafore, with ribbons in her braided hair, she wonders whether he will like her appearance. Her hope is sharpened by her resemblance to him: she has his chin and nose, while her fair skin and blonde hair recall her mother, Mae.

That hopeful attention meets Alex’s cold scrutiny. He asks Mae whether she chose Sarah’s blue clothes deliberately to bring out the color of her eyes. Sarah looks toward her mother and sees hurt on Mae’s face. The detail makes Alex’s rejection begin not as an abstract family dispute but as a scene Sarah watches and tries to understand through the expressions of the adults around her.

The Refusal of Paternity

When Sarah reaches for Alex’s coat and calls him Papa, he tells her not to call him that. She is frightened and confused: to her, he is her father, and she cannot understand why he denies the word. Alex later states that he already has children with his wife, whom he calls legitimate, and that he did not want another child. He tells Mae that Sarah should never have been born and blames Mae for insisting on having her.

The rejection turns Sarah’s longing into self-accusation. She comes to believe that her existence is the reason Mae is unhappy, and after Alex leaves she refuses to call him Papa. When Mae grows ill, Sarah remembers his departure alongside her mother’s sadness and wonders whether Alex will return. Alex’s refusal therefore damages more than the possibility of a father-daughter bond: it becomes part of the story Sarah tells herself about causing the suffering of those she loves.

Loss and the Meaning of Freedom

After Mae dies when Sarah is eight, Rab tells others that Mae is free from her unhappiness. Sarah interprets that freedom as freedom from herself, imagining that her mother might have lived happily if Sarah had never been born. The thought carries Alex’s earlier repudiation forward: his claim that Sarah should not have existed becomes entangled with her grief and her sense of responsibility for Mae’s fate.

Rab’s own drunken, confused farewell later compounds Sarah’s experience of adults leaving her, though his parting belongs to a different relationship. The sequence helps explain why the childhood rejection by Alex is not a closed episode in Angel’s life. Her memories persist beneath the emotional numbness she later chooses over pain.

The Wound Recalled in Adulthood

As an adult, Angel recalls her childhood pain and deliberately pushes the memories down, preferring hollowness to reliving them. The rejected child’s learned self-blame reappears in her response to infertility and her marriage to Michael Hosea. Seeing Elizabeth pregnant makes Angel wistful; she later asks Michael what she can give him when what he wants is a child, and wishes she had not been ruined by Duke or touched by anyone else.

When she leaves Michael, she tells Miriam that she never belonged with him and that she cannot have children, arguing that he deserves them. She urges Miriam to love Michael and give him the children she cannot. This decision is not a direct consequence of Alex’s actions alone, but its language of unworthiness and self-erasure recalls the childhood belief that Sarah’s existence harmed her mother. The relationship’s lasting significance lies in that transmission: Alex’s denial of his daughter helps form a private logic in which love is something Angel expects to lose and sacrifice is a way to spare others from her perceived damage.