Then came Claire. My middle girl, my wild card.

She found me in the crowd and waved with both hands, just like she used to wave from the school bus window when she was eight. I waved back with everything I had.

Last came June.

She didn’t smile. She crossed that stage the way she had moved through her whole life, as if she carried something heavier than the rest of us could see. Something heavier than a diploma.

I raised the camera. The shutter clicked. That should have been the end.

Then the dean returned to the microphone and tapped it twice.

I lowered the camera.

Then my girls, or rather young women, came back onto the stage together, holding hands the way they used to when crossing parking lots at five years old.

Something pulled tight in my chest, though I didn’t know why.

June took the microphone.

“Our father couldn’t be here today,” she said.

My stomach dropped through the auditorium floor.

Daniel.

They were going to speak about Daniel.

Twenty-two years of birthday cards he never mailed, phone calls he never made, and now, on the one day I had truly shown up for, they were going to honor the man who hadn’t.

The hurt rose in my throat like it had been waiting there all along. I told myself to stay still, to smile, and to let them have this if they needed it.

Ava reached into the sleeve of her gown and took out a folded sheet of paper. Claire covered her mouth with one hand, and I saw her shoulders trembling.

“We found the notebook,” June said. “The one in the kitchen drawer.”

I shut my eyes and gripped the camera so tightly that I heard the plastic creak. I thought of the gas receipt note, still folded in my wallet. I thought of Patricia, and every birthday I had spent at that warped kitchen table with a pen in my hand, writing to three girls who were already asleep.

Back then, I told myself they might read it someday or they might not, but either way, I had written what needed to be said.

Then June began to read.