When Allie hears her daughter whisper “I miss you, Dad” into the landline, she is so surprising. Her husband has passed away for 18 years, or so she thought. As upset truths unravel, Allie is forced to face the past and the lie that changed their entire lives.
My husband passed away when our daughter, Susie, was just two weeks old.
A car accident. Sudden, brutal, and senseless. One minute, Charles was kissing my forehead as he left for a quick grocery run. The next, I was clutching a police officer’s hand, struggling to process words that didn’t make sense.
He was gone. Just like that.
I was 23. I held a newborn in my arms who needed more than my broken self could offer. That’s when Diane, Charles’s mother, stepped in.
I never saw his body.
I told myself that it didn’t matter. D3ad was d3ad, right?
Eighteen years passed. And somehow, I survived them.
Susie grew up kind. She was sensitive in ways that sometimes broke me. She had Charles’s eyes, those soft brown eyes, always searching the world.
As she grew older, her questions came like whispers in the night.
“What was Dad like?” she’d say.
I told her about his awful dad jokes that made me roll my eyes. Photos of his boyish grin.
She accepted them, but I could feel the space behind her eyes. The space where real knowing should have lived.
It happened on an ordinary Tuesday evening. I was walking past the hallway when I heard Susie’s voice. It was low, tender, and she was whispering through the landline.
