“But you are my real daughter.

You always were.”

I could not hold it back any longer, and I did not try.

I wept, openly, holding his hand.

Raymond had never once tried to replace my biological father, and he had never asked me to call him Dad.

He had been there, steadily, for the whole of my life — the one who taught me to drive on the empty back roads outside town, who stood at my graduation clapping until his hands must have hurt, who sat for hours in his truck outside the testing centers while I took my naval medical exams, so that whatever the result, there would be someone waiting.