The watch is time, kept close, kept running, kept honored.

When I wind it in the mornings I think of all the mornings he woke in his bare little room and chose, again, to stay invisible, to stay poor, to stay away, for one more day, for me.

And I think that the best way to thank a man who gave you twenty years of his life is to refuse to waste a single one of the years he bought you.

So I live boldly, as he asked.

I build the walls he taught me to build, around families who need them the way my mother once did.

And every so often, in a quiet moment, I take out the photograph of the two of them on the sunlit pier, my young mother with her hands over the curve of me, my father with his arm around them both and his whole unbroken face full of hope, and I look at it, and I let myself feel the thing I spent my whole life certain I would never get to feel.

I look at my father’s face, and I know, with no wondering left in me anywhere, that I was loved before I was born, and loved every day I lived, and loved still, from wherever he watches now, probably from the back of the room, the way he always did.