When Allie hears her daughter whisper “I miss you, Dad” into the landline, her world cracks open. Her husband has been dead for 18 years, or so she thought. As unsettling truths unravel, Allie is forced to confront the past and the lie that shaped their entire lives.

My husband died when our daughter, Susie, was just two weeks old.

A car crash.

That’s what they told me. Sudden, brutal, and senseless. One minute, Charles was kissing my forehead as he left for a quick grocery run.

The next, I was clutching a police officer’s hand, struggling to process words that didn’t make sense.

He was gone. Just like that.

I was 23. Grief clung to me like a second skin.

Worse still, I held a newborn in my arms who needed more than my broken self could offer. That’s when Diane, Charles’s mother, stepped in. She worked in the mayor’s office and promised “to make everything easier” for me.

I didn’t argue.

I didn’t even question.

I just nodded while the funeral went on. It was a closed casket, I was told that there were injuries to his face. Diane insisted on a quick cremation.

She made the calls. I stayed in bed, holding Susie, letting Diane smooth over the cracks of my world like wallpaper on rotting walls.

I never saw his body.

I told myself that it didn’t matter. Dead was dead, right?

Eighteen years passed.

And somehow, I survived them.

I went from a girl cradling a newborn and grief in equal measure to a woman piecing life together in quiet, deliberate ways. It wasn’t brave or beautiful… it was necessary.

You get up.

You make breakfast. You fold tiny clothes. You keep going.

Susie grew up kind.

Curious. She was sensitive in ways that sometimes broke me. She had Charles’s eyes, those soft brown eyes, always searching the world.

And his dimple when she smiled… though it came slower, more cautious, like whatever it was needed to be worthy of her smile.

As she grew older, her questions came like whispers in the night. Gentle.

Careful. Almost as if she didn’t want to hurt me by asking.

“What was Dad like?” she’d say, usually when my hands were busy folding laundry or stirring soup, or wiping down counters.

I gave her what little I had. Stories that wore thin from retelling.

I told her about his awful dad jokes that made me roll my eyes. Photos of his boyish grin. The memory of how he used to sing in the car, always off-key.