Elise is nineteen and I sit in this house and I try to work out when exactly I lost her.

  Not the way I lost Lira. That one I can trace. I know the shape of that loss, I made it myself, I have the full map of every decision that led there. That one I can look at directly now even if I couldn’t for years.

  Elise is harder.

  Because I was here. That’s the part I can’t get past. I was physically present in this house for her entire childhood and somehow she still grew up alone in it. I was at the dinner table. I went to the school things. I paid for everything. I thought that was most of it.

  You thought provision was the same as presence.

  I know. I understand that now.

  She calls Sundays. Seven, eight minutes. Grades, week, fine. I try sometimes, I ask something real, and it lands wrong, too late, like a joke after the moment has passed. The shape of our conversations was fixed when she was nine and I said a sentence I didn’t mean and then stood outside her door and walked away.

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  I’ve thought about that a lot. That minute outside her door. I’ve thought about the version of that night where I went in. Where I sat on the edge of her bed and said I didn’t mean it, I was tired, it wasn’t true, none of it was your fault.

  That version of you would have a different daughter right now.

  I know.

  Lira is gone completely. Changed everything when she left. Number, address, no trail. I looked once, about a year out, and came up with nothing. She was serious about it. She built a whole new life somewhere and sealed the door behind her, and I understand why, I do, I just.

  I sit in the house she used to run.

  The cupboards are still arranged the way she arranged them. I noticed that once, years ago, really noticed it. The logic of it. Everything positioned in a way that makes the kitchen work smoothly if you know the system. I’ve never changed it. I don’t know if that’s sentimentality or just that it works and I’m not going to fix something that works.

  She thought of everything. You thought of nothing.

  I turn the TV on.

  I know I still have time with Elise. She’s nineteen. That’s not nothing. I could still call her on a Tuesday for no reason. I could still ask the real questions and wait for the real answers even if it takes a while.

  I look at the phone.

  I turn the volume up.

  Tomorrow, I think. I’ll call on a Tuesday. Tomorrow.

  I don’t call on Tuesday.