Your father shuts himself in the smallest room of the house and sleeps on an air mattress with a throw blanket he bought from Amazon. He spends hours talking to a girl he met on an online game. She's the full package. He’s confessed his love for her in a low, timorous voice lying curled up on his air mattress, it squelches and bumps against the door whenever he moves. He's reassured her we're leaving soon and is trying to convince her to move in with him to see if it would work out. He wants to be respectful to me and show you what it looks like for a man to love a woman of quality. He told her he never loved me, I was just a girl he got pregnant before he left for deployment. He tried to do the right thing by us, but I'm too different and don't listen. He invited us to stay with him to help me get back onto my feet because he wasn't comfortable with the sub par living conditions of our old apartment.

I wasn't supposed to hear that, but I did and it can't be unheard.

Four years robbed of value -- laundry washed and meals cooked without needing to be asked, illnesses catered to, trips to the zoo, movies watched together that made you smile, teaching you how to swim in the pool, going to the library to find books for you, including him in our mundane life that no one else gets to see, giving him the opportunity to become an involved father, sharing the most intimate parts of myself with him, all discounted because he's unable to admit to himself he squandered his time with us lost in depression and alcoholism.