“What’s going on in that beautiful head of yours?” Ryder asks, his thumb brushing my temple. “It feels like you’re pulling away, even while you’re right here.”
I hesitate, not sure where this is coming from or how to put it into words. “I’ve been thinking about something. Someone, actually.”
“Tell me,” he urges, his hand stilling on my shoulder.
I pick at a loose thread on my thermal shirt, trying to find the courage. “My father. I’ve been thinking about my father.”
Ryder goes still but doesn’t interrupt, just waits with a patient attention that makes me feel safe enough to continue.
“He left when I was eight,” I murmur. “Just… walked away one day and never came back.”
“What do you remember about him?”
The question is gentle, non-judgmental. Not asking why I’m bringing this up now, just… listening.
“He used to call me Sunshine,” I whisper, and the word catches in my throat. “It was our thing, you know? He’d wake me up every morning saying, ‘Rise and shine, my little Sunshine.’ Made me feel special. Like I was the best part of his day.”
“You were,” Ryder says with quiet certainty.
“How can you know that?”
“Because I’ve seen how you light up a room. How you care for every creature that crosses your path. How you fight for what matters even when you’re scared.” His hand finds mine. “A father would have to be blind not to see that in his daughter.”
The words hit deeper than he probably intended. “What if I remembered it wrong? What if he wasn’t actually that good of a father and I’ve just… built him up in my memory?”
“Tell me more about him,” Ryder says. “A real memory. Something specific.”
I close my eyes, reaching back through two decades of trying not to remember. “It was maybe a week before he left. I’d fallen off my bike and scraped my knee pretty badly. I was crying, and he scooped me up and carried me inside. Instead of just cleaning the cut and putting on a band-aid, he sat with me for an hour, telling me stories about brave little girls who overcame obstacles.” My voice cracks. “He said I was the bravest little girl he knew. His brave little Sunshine.”
Ryder’s watching my face carefully. “What happened next?” Ryder asks quietly. “After that memory?”
“I don’t know exactly. One day he was there, and then…” I trail off, trying to piece together fragments. “Mom said he left. He didn’t want to be a father anymore. That we were better off without him.”
“Do you remember anything else about that time?”
I close my eyes, trying to remember instead of just accepting the version I’d been told for so long. And suddenly, details I’d forgotten start crystallizing.
“Mom packed us up really quickly,” I say slowly. “I remember being confused because she said we were moving across the country to Los Angeles for a ‘fresh start,’ but we left so many of my things behind. Things Dad had given me.”
“How quickly?”
“A day? Maybe two? I was upset because I didn’t get to say goodbye to my friends, and when I asked why we had to leave so fast, Mom said…” I pause, the memory hitting me like cold water. “She said Dad would probably try to follow us if we didn’t get far away quickly enough.”
Ryder goes very still. “She said he would try to follow you?”
“Yeah, but she made it sound like a bad thing. Like he’d try to hurt us or cause trouble.” But even as I say it, I’m remembering the way my father had been with me—gentle, protective, loving. The man who called me Sunshine and made me feel like I was the center of his world. The disconnect is jarring. “But that doesn’t sound like the dad I remember, does it?”
“No,” Ryder says carefully. “It doesn’t.”
Something shifts in my chest as I keep talking, the memories coming faster now.
“Did your dad know you were moving?”
I think back, painstakingly searching the memories. “I don’t think so. Mom said we couldn’t tell him because it would ‘complicate things.’ I thought that meant he’d be mean about it or try to stop us out of spite.” My voice cracks. “Or maybe he would have tried to stop us because he loved me and didn’t want to lose his daughter.”
The tears come—hot and unexpected. Not just sadness, but anger. White-hot fury at my mother for maybe, possibly, stealingtwenty years from me. For taking away a doting father and making me believe he didn’t want me anymore.
“What if he came to pick me up that Saturday for his visitation and we were just… gone?” I whisper. “What if he showed up at our house and found it empty? What if he had no idea where we went?”
