He went to every parent-teacher conference. He taught her to ride a bike in the church parking lot. He taught her to change a tire when she was twelve because he said every girl should know how. He sat up with her through chicken pox and the flu and her first heartbreak at sixteen, when a boy named Tyler broke up with her in a text message and she cried on the kitchen floor and Rob sat down on the floor next to her in his greasy coveralls and didn’t say a word for an hour.
He walked her down the aisle when she married her husband, Marcus, when she was twenty-six.
She called him Dad. Every day of her life. From the time she was nine years old.
Wayne Duffy never once came looking for her. Not a birthday card. Not a phone call. Nothing. For twenty-nine years.
