Mia's POV

  "Mom, are you okay?"

  "Why are you crying, mom?"

  "I'm here. Don't worry. It will be fine."

  I had said those words so many times they had stopped meaning anything.

  Day after day. Month after month. Year after year. The same words, offered up like a prayer to something that wasn't listening — trying to change a future I couldn't reach while barely holding onto a present that kept slipping through my fingers anyway.

  I was not a child who grew up without a father.

  At least, that's what people assumed when they looked at us. That I wasn't like the others — a product of artificial reproduction, but a child of love, born into a world that had learned to work around the absence of men. It was easier to let them think that. Easier than the truth, which was messier and older and didn't resolve neatly into something you could expin at a school introduction.

  My parents were childhood sweethearts.

  That's what my mother called them, on the rare occasions she called them anything at all. She said the night she confessed her feelings was the most precious night of her life. She said it the way people say things they are trying to keep alive through repetition — carefully, with both hands, like carrying something that has already started to crack.

  They were young when I arrived. Too young, probably, though nobody said that part out loud.

  I don't remember much of those early years. My father is a collection of rare appearances rather than memories — the kind that stand out precisely because of how infrequently they occurred.

  He came home sometimes. That was the thing. Not never — sometimes. Enough that his presence never fully stopped meaning something. Enough that every time the door opened in the evening there was still that involuntary lift in my chest, that half-second of possibility, before I eventually learned to stop feeling it.

  He smelled like alcohol and somewhere else. He would drop his bag by the door, move through the house like someone passing through a hotel room — acknowledging the furniture without quite belonging to it — and then be gone again before I had figured out what to say to him.

  I don't know where he went during all those hours. I never asked. My mother never expined, and I learned early that some questions changed the air in a room in ways that were difficult to recover from.

  What I remember most is the waiting.

  Not dramatic waiting. Just the quiet, persistent kind that becomes so ordinary you stop recognizing it as waiting at all. Listening for footsteps that didn't come. Setting the table for three when it would only ever be two. Growing up in the space between his arrivals and departures, learning to build something out of the in-between.

  The nights he was home were the loudest.

  Arguments that started low and built into something that pressed through every wall in the house. My mother's voice tight and fraying at the edges. His voice defensive, already halfway out the door even while standing in the kitchen. I y in bed and listened to two people who only seemed to find each other in conflict, and wondered, in the wordless way children wonder, what it was that kept bringing him back at all.

  It wasn't love. Or if it was, it was a version of love I didn't yet have words for.

  I was too young to understand any of it.

  I understood all of it.

  And then, before I had fully processed any of it, I was in middle school.

  It had been months since I st saw him. My mother was present in the way a ghost is present — occupying the house, moving through it, but somewhere else entirely. She drowned herself in work during the day and in something else entirely at night.

  Every night I heard the door click open in the middle of the night. She brought a new guy every week. Some were cheap, some expensive depending on the budget. I learned not to come downstairs when it did. I learned that different shoes in the hallway meant a different kind of silence was required from me.

  Nobody helped me with my homework. Nobody came to parent-teacher meetings. My first sports day, I looked at the crowd from the starting line for a long time before I stopped looking.

  I never bmed them. Not exactly. It sat in me more like a splinter than a wound — too small to operate on, too persistent to ignore. A sensitivity that lived in a pce too tender to touch.

  Until I found it, the diary.

  I was looking for old textbooks in the storeroom — the kind of task that takes ten minutes or an hour depending on how organized someone used to be before they stopped caring. The air was thick with dust, heavy with the smell of things that hadn't been moved in years.

  A book fell from the upper shelf.

  Not a textbook. A diary — small, cloth-covered, the kind that came with a little brass csp that had long since stopped locking properly. Old enough that the corners had softened and the spine had cracked, but kept with a care that contradicted its age. Someone had wrapped a ribbon around it once, faded now, still loosely tied.

  It looked like something that had mattered enormously to someone, at some point, before it ended up here collecting dust alongside everything else that had been put away and forgotten.

  I don't know why I opened it.

  I knew, even as I reached for it, that I probably shouldn't.

  I opened it anyway.

  The first page had two distinctive names in it.

  Maria and her sweetheart Kenji

  The names of my mom and dad and a Photo of my dad

  7th March, 2006

  okay so I literally cannot stop shaking long enough to write this properly but I NEED to write this down before I convince myself it didn't happen

  he said yes.

  HE SAID YES.

  I've been pnning what to say for like three weeks and then when the actual moment came my brain just — left. Everything I practiced just evaporated and I said it all wrong and in the wrong order and I was literally standing there thinking okay this is it you've ruined everything and then he just.

  smiled.

  that smile.

  I think I actually stopped breathing. Like genuinely medically stopped.

  I wanted to hug him so badly I don't know how I didn't. I held myself back because I didn't want to seem crazy on literally day one but inside I was absolutely losing my mind.

  okay I need to calm down and think about the date. I want to pn something good. Something that shows him I'm worth choosing. Something perfect.

  we're going to be so happy I already know it. I just know.

  10th March, 2006

  he said yes to the movies and I have been completely useless ever since.

  I asked literally everyone for recommendations. I even went and watched it alone first to make sure it was okay — sat in an almost empty theatre taking mental notes like some kind of movie journalist. Is it too much? Is it too boring? Will he ugh? Will the mood be right?

  I think it's perfect. Romantic but not embarrassing. The kind of movie that might make him feel something without making things weird.

  I've also been staring at my wardrobe for four hours.

  I just want to look right. Not overdressed. Not underdressed. Just — right. The version of me that he looked at and said yes to, but slightly more put together.

  is that crazy? it's probably crazy.

  I don't care. I want him to look at me and feel like he made a good decision.

  11th March, 2006

  okay I need to write this all down immediately while it's still perfectly fresh in my brain

  he showed up and I genuinely forgot how to function for a moment. like my legs just — paused. he was wearing this outfit and I cannot expin it but something about it just completely got me and I had to take a second before walking over because walking over and immediately grabbing his face was probably not the move.

  he said I looked beautiful.

  he looked right at me and said it like it was just a fact he was reporting.

  I had to look at a mppost for a second. I genuinely could not look at him and speak at the same time. I told him he looked nice which is possibly the most useless sentence I have ever produced in my life but it was all I had.

  he smiled that smile and I swear to god nineteen years and I still don't know what to do with myself when that happens.

  the movie was so good. he ughed in all the right pces. at one point in the dark our hands were really close together and I was completely incapable of thinking about literally anything else for the rest of the film.

  nothing happened. not the way I imagined.

  but that's okay. we have time. I'm going to be patient and smart about this and absolutely no other girl is getting anywhere near him.

  I know that sounds a lot. I genuinely do not care. he is mine and I love him and I have loved him for so long that it lives in my bones now.

  20th April, 2007

  I don't understand.

  I keep going back through everything. every day, every conversation, every moment I can remember and I can't find it. the part where I did something wrong. the part where I became not enough.

  he said he can't be with just me.

  just me.

  like I was too small a thing. like one person loving you completely was somehow a problem to solve.

  I gave him everything. I was so careful. I thought about what he needed before I thought about what I needed. I pnned and waited and held back and held back and held back and I thought — I genuinely thought — that was what love was supposed to look like.

  why wasn't it enough.

  am I ugly? is it my face? my voice? the way I take up space? I keep looking in the mirror trying to find the thing that made him look elsewhere and I can't find it and I don't know if that's better or worse.

  I don't want to be here right now. not in this room. not in this feeling.

  I hate this. I hate this. I hate this.

  why am I so easy to leave.

  27th May, 2007

  I'm pregnant.

  I found out a few days ago and I've just been sitting with it. I don't know what else to do with it yet.

  it's been over a month since I st spoke to him. I didn't reach out. he didn't either. the silence just sort of hardened between us until it became something with walls.

  I hadn't been feeling well for a while. I thought it was everything else — the not eating properly, the not sleeping, the staying in my room until the hours blurred together. I tried to just push through it.

  mom noticed before I said anything. she took me to the clinic without making it a whole conversation which was probably the kindest thing she could have done. the woman there was gentle about it. told me quietly.

  I sat there for a really long time after.

  we only did it once.

  once.

  I don't know what I feel. I've been turning it over and over and I can't nd on anything clean. there's shock and something that feels like grief and then underneath all of that, so quiet I almost missed it —

  hope.

  he loves kids. I've seen it. the way he gets around them, softer and more certain at the same time.

  if I tell him. when I tell him.

  he'll come back. not out of obligation. because this is real. because this belongs to both of us and he'll understand that.

  he has to.

  he will.

  ...he has to.

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  AnnouncementI hope you liked this one. It will have a part two and will be coming tomorrow.