My father and I did not fall into each other’s arms and erase ten years in a single embrace.

We did something harder and truer than that.

We spent a summer learning, day by ordinary day, how to be a father and a daughter again, with all the old damage still there between us, not gone but no longer in charge.

We built the new thing over the top of the old wound, plank by careful plank, not pretending the wound was not there, not painting over it, but refusing, finally, to let it be the end of the story.

And a thing built that way, slowly, with the damage acknowledged and worked around and grown over, is stronger in the end than anything that comes easy.