The room smells faintly of antiseptic and rain a mix that always makes him sick. Simon stands by the window, watching the drizzle blur the world outside. Behind him, your soft breathing fills the silence. Every fragile inhale is proof you’re still here. Proof it isn’t too late. He tells himself that every morning, and every morning, it feels like a lie.

Once, a woman with kind eyes had smiled through pain and whispered, “Take care of her, Si.” He’d promised. He’d meant it. But when death took her, it took him too just slower. He hid in missions, in static-filled radios, in noise that drowned out the echo of a little girl crying, “Daddy, where’s Mommy?”

You were five too small to understand. He thought distance would protect you from his brokenness. Instead, it left you alone.

Then came her the woman with soft words and perfect manners. Two polite children. The picture of family. Sweet when he looked, cruel when you did. She banned your mother’s name, whispered poison into Simon’s ear that you were manipulative, disrespectful, a brat. And he believed her.

When you told him what she did how her children hit you, how she locked you out, how you’d go to school in torn clothes because she’d taken the allowance meant for you he called it exaggeration. “Grow up,” he’d said once, when you were eleven, trembling in front of him. “Stop making shit up.”

The bruises healed, the silence didn’t. You stopped trying. He never asked why your grades fell, why you flinched, why you barely ate. He called you lazy, difficult, ungrateful. His new family shone. You faded into the edges the forgotten child at the dinner table. No birthdays, no gifts. Just cruelty.

When you grew sick, pale, coughing blood, he said you were faking it for attention. Because how could his perfect wife and kids be wrong?

Until your body gave out.

The day you fainted in school, vomiting blood, everything shattered. The phone call from the hospital the words “severe internal bruising,” “neglect,” “possible abuse”. The nurses whispering, the CPS officer’s voice cold and sharp. Bruises. Old scars. Reports of neglect.

For the first time in years, Simon felt something, horror.

You, his daughter. The one he’d sworn to protect. And he hadn’t just failed you, he’d delivered you to your abusers. He vomited in the hospital bathroom when he realized what he’d done. Then came the words that gutted him: lung cancer. The same thing that took your mother.

He ended it all the marriage, the pretense, the lies. Pressed charges. Threw her and her perfect kids out. But none of it mattered. Not when you looked at him with that same emptiness he once carried. You didn’t yell, didn’t cry. You just existed. Like a ghost walking through the ruins he’d made. There was no redemption big enough to fit what he’d done.

So he retired. Left the army. Left everything. Now, his life is quiet, a slow kind of penance. He wakes before you do, makes tea the way the nurses said you like it. Sits through every chemo, every therapy session. Cooks food you don’t touch. Talks to you, even when you won’t reply.

He’s learning what it means to stay.

Sometimes, you catch him watching you that haunted look in his eyes. It’s that haunted look in his eyes. It’s the same one he wore at your mother’s funeral. Guilt carved into his face like it’s part of him now. You don’t speak much. You can’t. The years took something out of you that words can’t rebuild. You sit in silence, and he doesn’t push.

Because he knows he doesn’t deserve your voice.

At night, he whispers her name. “I failed her, love. I failed her bad.” His voice cracks in the dark. He doesn’t ask for forgiveness, he just wants to make sure you’ll never wonder if he’s here again.

You might never call him Dad. You might never forgive him. He knows that. But if staying means carrying the weight of what he’s done, then so be it.

Because this time, he’s not running.

He’s staying for you. For the little girl he left behind. For the promise he broke. And maybe, if there’s any mercy left in the world, staying will be enough.