There was one night, maybe a year and a half in, I actually pulled up his number. I sat on my couch with my thumb over the call button for I don’t know how long.

I even typed out a text. “Dad, can we talk.” I deleted it. I told myself I’d do it that weekend instead. I didn’t. I don’t even remember what I did that weekend. Nothing important, I’m sure.

Ray kept talking in that parking lot and I kept standing there like my feet were glued to the ground.

“I asked him about it once,” Ray said. “Second year, I think. I figured he was waiting on somebody. So I walked over and asked him straight. Why do you come here every day, mister?”

I didn’t want to hear the answer and I needed to hear it more than I’ve needed anything in my life.

“He said, ‘I just need to see her walk through that door.'” Ray’s voice dropped real low. “‘That’s how I know she’s okay.'”

I started shaking right there on the church steps. Three years. Twelve o’clock sharp. Every single day I’d walked out of that building to grab a salad or run to my car, and forty feet away my father was sitting in his Buick, watching me, making sure I was alright, and then driving home without ever saying a word.

I asked Ray why he never just came inside. Why he never walked up to me. Ray shrugged, slow and sad. “I think he was scared you’d tell him to leave.”

And he was right. God help me, in that first year, I probably would have.

I thought that was the whole story. I thought I’d already heard the worst part.

Then Ray said, “There’s one more thing, Mrs. Ellis.” And he reached into his jacket pocket.

“Every single day,” he said, “he had a second sandwich sitting on the passenger seat. Wrapped in foil. Never ate it. Brought it back home, far as I could tell, and brought a fresh one the next day. Same thing every time.”

I asked him what kind. The accountant in me, I guess. Always needing the line item even when my whole life is falling apart.