PART 5 — FINAL
That was three years ago.
My daughters are healing. It took time, and a good child therapist, and a father who kept his promise to be present. Valeria is twelve now, and she’s slowly unlearned the flinch, the smallness, the instinct to make herself invisible. Sofia is nine, and she still has the rabbit, and she sleeps well now, which she didn’t for a long time after Chloe. They laugh in the main living room — the room Chloe forbade them from — as loudly as they want, every single day, because it’s their house, and I made sure they know that in their bones.
I changed my life. I stepped back from the relentless travel and the acquisitions that had made me a stranger in my own home. My company survived me being more of a father and less of a machine — companies always do; children don’t get a second childhood. I’m here now. School pickups, breakfast, bedtime, all of it. The thing I almost lost by not paying attention, I now pay attention to above everything else.
