Mostly I thought about a father who’d driven forty minutes for what I called a minor surgery, because he knew I called hard things minor when I didn’t want him to worry.

He came anyway. He always had.

The reading glasses sit on Amber’s nightstand now. She took them home in May, and I didn’t realize how much it mattered until I walked into Dad’s bedroom and saw the empty spot where they’d always been.

That small absence taught me something — the house was becoming what it was meant to become. Not a museum. Not a monument. Not a place frozen in time.

A home that honored the life my father had lived while making room for the lives that would go on after him.

That’s what homes do, if we let them. And that was worth fighting for.

THE END.