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“Are you afraid of something?”

His head turned sharply. “Why would you ask that?”

“Because you’ve checked the door four times.”

He looked at me for a long moment, and something in his face made my irritation weaken.

My father had never been a frightened man.

Careful, yes. Private. Sometimes frustratingly secretive. But never frightened.

When I was a child, storms had never concerned me because he was in the house. When my mother died, he was the one who taught me grief could be survived by waking each morning and doing the next necessary thing.

He filled the space my mother had left behind. He folded laundry with terrible precision. He kept the world moving even when ours had stopped. Now he looked at our front door as though death stood patiently on the other side.

“Sit with me,” I said.

“I have work to do.”

His eyes moved towards the brown file resting on the sideboard.

He had kept it close since the beginning of the week. He took it upstairs when he slept. He carried it into the kitchen when he made breakfast. Earlier that afternoon, I had found him standing over the fireplace with a lighter in one hand and the folder in the other, though he hadn’t burned it.

Whatever was inside frightened him too much to keep and mattered too much to destroy.

Meanwhile, he changed his route home every evening. He stopped dining at his usual restaurant. He had even removed the battery from his telephone once and left it in pieces on the table, convinced someone was listening. Something was making him paranoid.

I had suggested he see a doctor. The shame of that would come later. It would find me in the dark and dig its fingers into every place already bleeding.

“Tell me what’s happening, father.”

He crossed the room at last and sat opposite me. For several seconds, neither of us spoke.

The clock above the stove ticked between us. The pot on the stove had gone cold, and the air still held the scent of the tomato sauce he had made for dinner.

It had been an ordinary meal. Bread. Pasta. Too much parmesan, because he always pretended not to notice when I added more.

There had been no indication that the night would be our last. There had been no darkness at the windows. My father had complained that I cut the basil incorrectly, and I had asked him why it mattered if we were just going to eat it.

He had laughed. An hour later, there would be blood where he had stood.

He reached across the table and placed his hand over mine. His palm was warm and dry. “If anything happens to me, you run as fast and as far as you possibly can.”

The words were so quiet I almost believed I had misunderstood him. My hand stiffened beneath his.

“What? Why would something happen?”

He looked towards the hallway. The kitchen seemed to contract around us.

“Papa. What did you do?”

Pain moved through his expression. I pulled my hand away.

“Are you in trouble?”

“Yes.”

The truth came without hesitation, frightening.