When Miriam was very young, her father seemed steady, if not especially affectionate. He was a man of routines and measured words, but she remembered small gestures that felt like proof of care: the way he hoisted her onto his shoulders during the summer fair, how he guided her hands when she tried to skip stones, the way he tucked the blankets around her toes at night.
He wasn’t exuberant, not the kind of father who swept children into wild embraces, but she never doubted that he noticed her. Her early memories were colored by those simple moments of belonging.