On the one-year anniversary of that night, Emma asked me to drive her to the cemetery where Maggie is buried.
She had yellow roses on her lap. She was wearing Frank’s old leather cut. The one with the medic patch and the pink ribbon. He gave it to her on her seventeenth birthday. She wears it everywhere now.
Frank was already at the cemetery. Sitting on a bench near the grave. He stood when he saw us.
Emma knelt at the headstone.
“Maggie,” she said. “I brought you flowers. I wanted to tell you thank you. You saved me. You reached across twenty-eight years and sent your father to find me. I don’t know how. But I know you did.”
She stood and took Frank’s hand.
I stayed by the car.
I watched my daughter stand at the grave of a girl she never met, next to a man who should have been a stranger, and I thought about the crowbar I swung in the dark. How close my arm came to taking Frank’s life. How Emma would have died in that bedroom if he hadn’t been there.
How the worst night of my life became the night my daughter got a second father.
Frank looked up and saw me watching. He raised his hand. Just a small wave.
