Her mother had protected her from so much, but she had not been able to protect her from the wondering.
Rebecca looked at the dark ceiling and felt something she rarely let herself feel.
A slow-rising anger.
Not loud anger. Just a deep, quiet heat, the kind that has been kept carefully banked for years and has never quite gone out.
She thought about Father’s Day, every year without fail: the banners in the shops, the cards in the windows, the pastor asking fathers to stand. She had sat in those pews as a child and looked at the floor and told herself it did not matter.
She thought about the school drawing, herself and her mother and the empty space beside them that she had not known how to fill.
She thought about every time someone had asked casually, the way children do, “Where’s your dad?” and how she had learned over time to shrug it off so smoothly that people stopped asking.
She had told herself all her life that she was fine, that she and her mother had been enough, that the absence of a father was simply the shape of her particular life, and she had made peace with it.