Elise is thirteen and I am failing her and I know it.

  I know it the way you know things you’ve decided not to act on. It sits in the corner of every room I’m in, the fact of how I’m failing her, and I look at it sometimes and then I look away because looking directly at it would require me to be a different kind of man than I have figured out how to be.

  She’s so quiet. That’s the thing. She was a loud kid, once. I remember that. She used to run down hallways and narrate things and ask questions constantly, three questions before you’d finished answering the first one. Now she moves through the house like she’s trying not to take up space. Like she learned somewhere that taking up space was a problem.

  You taught her that. You and that sentence you said when she was nine that you didn’t mean but said anyway.

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  I said it. I know I said it. I was tired and angry and she asked for something and it came out before I could stop it and by the time I heard it in the air it was already too late. I stood outside her door that night for almost a full minute.

  I couldn’t go in.

  I don’t know how to go in. I never have. Lira always went in. Lira was the one who knocked and sat on the edge of the bed and talked. I was the one who stood in the doorway and said dinner’s ready.

  I don’t even have a way to reach Lira anymore. She changed everything when she left. Number, address, all of it. Clean cut. I looked once, about a year after, just to see if I could find something. I couldn’t. She was gone the way people are gone when they mean it.

  She meant it.

  I know she meant it. I knew it when she left. I just didn’t know, not really, what it would look like from the inside to be the house she left behind.

  I buy Elise the cereal she likes. I leave it on the counter. When she comes downstairs and sees it I watch her face do something small and careful.

  “Thanks,” she says.

  “Sure,” I say.

  We eat breakfast with the TV on.

  It’s not enough. I know it’s not enough. I just don’t know how to make it more.