I didn’t have to count anymore. The number lived in me.
It had started with a knock on the door at 6:52 in the morning, the kind of knock that doesn’t belong to friends or neighbors. Two men in uniform. Words delivered carefully, as if gentleness could soften their meaning. I remembered nodding, though I couldn’t tell you what I had agreed to in that moment. I remembered Lily standing at the end of the hallway, watching, understanding something without fully grasping it.
Since then, everything had changed in ways both obvious and invisible. The house was quieter, but also heavier, as if the absence itself had weight. There were routines we tried to maintain—school, dinner, bedtime—but there was always something missing just beneath the surface, something that no amount of effort could quite replace.
And now we were here, at a father-daughter dance.
I had almost not come.
But Lily had seen the flyer taped to the refrigerator—a cartoon version of a smiling father holding his daughter’s hand beneath a banner of hearts—and she had stared at it long enough that I couldn’t pretend she didn’t care.
“He would want you to go,” I had told her.
It was the kind of thing people say when they don’t know what else to say.
We found a spot near the edge of the gym, close to the refreshment table where the noise was slightly less intense. Lily sat down on the mat, smoothing her dress over her knees, her eyes scanning the room in a way that made my chest tighten.
Everywhere she looked, there were fathers.
Real ones. Present ones. Laughing, dancing, kneeling to fix crooked shoes or wiping sticky fingers with practiced ease. It wasn’t that they were doing anything extraordinary. That was the problem. It was all so ordinary.
