My brother didn’t get on a plane. He never did.
The cards stopped after that. Sometimes I wondered if the girls noticed. They never said.
***
I’d lie awake some nights and run the numbers in my head, the way you do when you’ve been broke long enough. Not money. The other kind.
Did I do enough?
Did I say the right things at the right time?
Did they know I loved them, or did they just know I was tired?
I wondered if the girls noticed.
There was a fear under all of it that I never said out loud. That somewhere in the back of their hearts, the triplets were still waiting for their real father.
That I was the man who’d been there, but not the man they wanted.
