Serving Her Father

She was always his favorite. Not in the way fathers are supposed to have favorites — not the one who got better grades or made him laugh the hardest at Sunday dinner. Something else. Something that lived in the spaces between glances across the kitchen table, in the way his hand lingered too long on her lower back when he guided her through a doorway, in the dresses he started buying her the month she turned eighteen. Always tight. Always thin. Always just for wearing around the house. By twenty-two, she stopped pretending there was a world outside those walls that mattered. College was a ghost she visited three days a week so the neighbors had something normal to point to. The rest of her hours belonged to him — to his voice, his hands, his rules written nowhere but understood in her bones.