Adele had it shipped to her mother’s address the next week anyway.
“She should have it,” Adele said. “Not as a punishment. As a mirror. What she does with it is up to her.”
PART 5 — FINAL
I walked my daughter down the aisle twenty minutes later.
My hands were shaking. Adele squeezed my arm and whispered, “Breathe, Dad. You’ve done harder things than this. You did all of it.”
I gave her away to a good man — a genuinely good one, I’d checked, the way a father of six daughters checks — and I sat in the front row where I’d sat for fifteen years of recitals and plays and graduations, and I watched my oldest girl get married, and the seat beside me was empty, and for the first time in fifteen years, the empty seat didn’t hurt.
Because it wasn’t a mother-shaped hole anymore.
It was just an empty chair, next to a father who’d never once left.
Here’s what happened after.
Maya never reached out again. I heard, through the long grapevine of a small town, that she moved to another state. The box, I’m told, she kept. I hope Adele was right. I hope it became a mirror. I’ve made my peace with never knowing.
My other five girls were at that wedding — Grace, Emma, Sophie, Lily, and June, who’s fifteen now, the baby I held while her mother packed suitcases.
June asked me that night, “Dad, do you wish she’d stayed?”
I thought about it honestly.
“No,” I said. “Because if she’d stayed, I’d have spent fifteen years being half of your parents.
Instead I got to be all of them.
