The Coat My Father Wouldn’t Take Off

Don’t come back now playing the devoted daughter.”

They thought I was going to feel guilty.

I understood the whole architecture of it in that moment — the strategy that had clearly worked on everyone else in my father’s life, the aunts and neighbors and old friends who’d been kept at a distance with exactly this story.

Julian and Chloe were the martyrs.

I was the absent one, the ambitious one, the daughter who’d chosen her career over her family and therefore had no standing to ask questions now.

It was a good strategy.