I was furious.
But I understood.
Thomas had not become better in time for me.
That was the tragedy.
Not the excuse.
Behind us, the girl at the table cursed.
Her shoe had come apart again.
I looked at the tube of glue in her hand.
“You’re using too much.”
She looked up.
“What?”
I sat beside her.
“You have to clean it first.”
She reluctantly slid the shoe toward me.
I scraped away the old adhesive.
“Otherwise it won’t hold.”
For ten minutes, nobody mentioned Thomas.
Nobody mentioned money.
Nobody mentioned the foundation.
I simply showed a girl how to fix a shoe.
For ten minutes, I was no one’s abandoned daughter.
No one’s inheritance.
No one’s obligation.
I was just a woman helping a child repair something that could still be saved.
And somewhere in the middle of those ten minutes, I realized the trap had finally closed.
Later, I found Caroline alone.
“Why did you call yourself his real daughter?” I asked.
She looked ashamed.
“I was jealous.”
“Of me?”
“He talked about you constantly near the end.”
I waited.
She looked down.
“Sometimes I wondered if loving me started because he was trying to become the father he should’ve been to you.”
I laughed bitterly.
I wanted to tell her she had nothing to complain about.
She’d had the father I’d spent my childhood waiting for.
But looking at her, I realized that wasn’t the whole truth.
“I knew he loved me,” Caroline said. “But sometimes I felt like I wasn’t enough.”
I sat beside her.
For the first time, neither of us had anything to defend.
Neither of us had won.
Neither of us had received exactly what we needed from Thomas.
We had simply been given different versions of his failures.
Before leaving, I went back to Thomas’s room.
The bed was empty.
Without him in it, the room suddenly looked enormous.
For most of my life, I’d wondered what was wrong with the six-year-old girl nobody came for.
I finally said it aloud.
“There wasn’t anything wrong with me.”
Caroline stood quietly behind me.
