Before the receptionist could answer, another voice came from behind me.
“Dad?”
Everything inside me stopped.
I turned.
Melissa stood perhaps fifteen feet away.
She had changed clothes, exchanging the light jacket for a blue cardigan. A woman wearing a Havenwood identification badge stood beside her.
Melissa looked at me as though she were staring at something from a dream she had nearly forgotten.
I tried to speak.
Nothing came.
Then Melissa took one careful step toward me.
“Dad,” she whispered again.
That was when I started crying.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
The tears simply came, seven years too late and all at once.
Melissa stopped several feet away.
She seemed uncertain whether she should touch me.
That hurt almost more than anything.
My daughter had once walked into my house without knocking, opened my refrigerator without asking and complained whenever I forgot her favorite coffee.
Now she looked at me as though she needed permission to come closer.
I opened my arms.
She crossed the distance slowly.
When she hugged me, I felt how small she had become.
“You’re alive,” I kept saying.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re alive.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.”
I closed my eyes.
For that moment, I did not ask where she had been.
I did not ask what Calvin had done.
I did not ask how anyone could have allowed this to happen.
I simply held my child.
The woman beside Melissa introduced herself as Dr. Elaine Foster, a rehabilitation psychologist.
She suggested we move to a private family room.
Melissa sat across from me on a sofa, twisting a tissue between her fingers.
I studied every part of her face.
The small line above her eyebrow from falling off a bicycle when she was nine.
The faint dimple on her left cheek.
Even the habit of rubbing her thumb against the side of her index finger when she was anxious.
No photograph could have prepared me for seeing those ordinary details again.
“I don’t understand,” I finally said.
Melissa looked toward Dr. Foster.
The doctor answered gently.
“There are still parts we’re trying to understand too.”
“Seven years?”
“Yes.”
“How does a person disappear for seven years?”
Melissa lowered her eyes.
Dr. Foster explained carefully.
The night of the crash, two women had been in Melissa’s car.
I had never known that.
Melissa had been driving a coworker home.
