A 46-year conversation that never happened.
A book about loss, self-reliance, and the slow, imperfect process of learning to trust other people — told through imagined conversations with a father who died when the author was ten.
The book is structured as a 46-year conversation with my father — starting when I was four, just after my mother died. The conversations continue through childhood, adolescence, career, marriage, fatherhood. They feel real. The reader experiences them as real.
My father speaks with warmth, with challenge, with the particular kind of honesty that only a parent can offer. He's there for the hard moments. He asks the questions I needed someone to ask. He says the things I spent decades wishing someone had said.
Late in the book, the reveal lands: these conversations were never real. They were constructs — born out of loss, necessity, and an inability to fully trust anyone else.
The voice I'd been hearing wasn't his. It was mine — the one I built when I lost everyone, the one that kept me moving, the one that convinced me I was independent when really I had never learned to let anyone in.
The nonprofit builds what was missing on the outside. The book maps what was missing on the inside. They're two expressions of the same life.