She did manage, she had no choice, but a quiet resentment coiled inside her, the ache of knowing she had once been loved and then somehow, inexplicably, lost it. By the time she left home, her relationship with her father was more absence than presence. Phone calls were brief, visits strained.
He never raised his voice to her again as he had at the lake, but he never let her back in either. What stung most was not knowing why. The attic, forever locked, loomed in her memory like the keeper of an answer she was never allowed to have. Still, the fragile rhythm of family life persisted, held together less by her father’s effort than by her mother’s quiet devotion.