And that very innocence was its own kind of gift, a clean slate offered to a man who had spent a decade certain he deserved none.

It was not perfect.

There were hard conversations that summer, and silences, and moments when the old hurt rose up in me and I had to sit with it and let it pass.

My father and I had ten years to account for, and we did not pretend otherwise.

But something real was being built, plank by plank, the way Grace and her grandfather built those birdhouses on the porch, and by the time the light began to change toward autumn, it was standing.

Not finished.