He told me he had never stopped thinking of me.

He told me that in the dark he had kept time by trying to imagine what I would look like at ten, at fifteen, at twenty — that he had raised me, in his mind, in a place where he could not see me, because it was the only thing that kept him a person.

He did not tell me the worst of it, and I did not ask, because some doors a daughter does not need her father to open.

“I always believed,” he said once, “that one day you would find me.

Not that you would come looking — you thought I was dead, how could you.

But that somehow, some way, you’d walk into that yard.