There were six daughters in total.
Six little girls who still needed help tying shoes, finishing homework, finding missing socks, brushing tangled hair, and understanding why their mother had suddenly stopped coming home…Elena left for Julian.
Her boss.
A man with money.
A man with a bigger house, better vacations, expensive restaurants, and the kind of life she had apparently decided she deserved more than the one she already had.
Their father never told the girls that.
Not then.
He simply said:
“Your mom needs some time.”
When they asked how much time, he said:
“I don’t know.”
When they asked whether she still loved them, he said:
“Of course she does.”
When Chloe waited by the front window on her seventh birthday because Elena had promised to call, he sat beside her until midnight.
“She probably got busy,” he said.
When the phone never rang, he made pancakes the next morning shaped like hearts.
He became very good at excuses.
Not because Elena had given him any.
Because he was trying to protect six little girls from a truth they were too young to carry.
He worked double shifts.
He learned how to braid hair badly.
Then better.
He packed six lunches before sunrise.
He attended parent-teacher conferences with grease still under his fingernails from work.
He sat through dance recitals.
Volleyball games.
School plays.
Emergency room visits.
Breakups.
College applications.
He signed permission slips at midnight because someone always remembered them at the last second.
And when Maya developed a fever at three in the morning, he sat on the bathroom floor with her until it broke.
Elena missed all of it.
Birthdays.
First days of school.
Graduations.
Christmas mornings.
Broken arms.
First dates.
The ordinary things.
The things that become a childhood.
Sometimes there were letters.
The girls sent them.
Most came back.