“I don’t feel strong,” I admitted, trying to smile in a way that didn’t quite work.
“You will be,” she said, her grip tightening just a little more, “because they’re going to need you.”
At the time, I thought she meant emotionally.
I didn’t understand that she meant completely.
Our father—Daniel Hayes—had already begun disappearing long before the boys were born, slipping out of our lives in quiet, almost unnoticeable ways, until one day there was nothing left of him but echoes and unfinished sentences and the kind of absence that feels louder than any argument ever could.
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