As illness settled into him, Miriam was the one who took him to appointments, who sat in waiting rooms with magazines she never read, who learned how to fold his prescriptions into the routine of each day. It wasn’t gratitude that kept her there, but an old hunger for recognition, a quiet hope that in the narrowing corridors of his final years, he might finally look at her differently.
One afternoon near the end, as he dozed in his armchair, Miriam gathered her courage. She had watched him cough until his chest rattled, watched his once-sharp eyes cloud with fatigue, and she knew time was slipping. “Dad,” she began, her voice low but steady, “did you ever have something against me? I mean—why was it always different with me?”