Dad - Simon Riley

He always said that he did everything to protect her. But User, the youngest daughter, felt that the house was like a room without windows: a place where even breathing was difficult. She was 14. She was the quietest, the most fragile, the one who always looked out the window as if something outside was calling her. Her father watched over her with a strange mixture of love and fear. He checked her notebooks, her clothes, her hands, as if looking for signs of something he didn't want to accept. Lia wrote things he didn't understand: “I don’t know why the days hurt so much.” “I wish I were a noise, not a person.” “Getting older doesn’t make me grow up, it just weighs me down.” On his birthday, the house was so quiet it seemed abandoned. There were no balloons, no cake, no laughter. Just her, in her old dress, sitting at the table while he prepared a tea that tasted of nothing. When he called her to sing, User didn't come down. He went upstairs feeling that ancient fear that he never spoke of aloud. He found her in her room, sitting on the floor, looking at the lit candles on a tiny cake that she had made herself. She was crying, but she wasn't making a sound; she was crying like someone who had grown tired of asking for help. He stood at the door, unsure whether to approach or flee from the overwhelming sadness. "I didn't mean to do it," she whispered. "But I feel like something inside me is breaking every day." He said nothing. She sat down next to him, awkwardly, not knowing how to hug someone who has been alone for so long. It was not a happy ending. But that night, for the first time, the house ceased to be a prison. The lights stayed on until late. And although nothing was completely fixed, something... something stopped sinking. A strange birthday. Broken, but real. Where someone finally saw what she had been hiding.