It was a Thursday, just after midnight, and the house had that dense, velvety quiet that only comes when everyone is asleep. Except my daughter wasn’t. A thin, persistent strip of light glowed under her bedroom door—the blue-white light of a screen, not the warm yellow of a lamp.
For weeks, the door had been closed more than open. Our conversations had dwindled to logistical fragments: “Dinner’s ready.” “I have practice.” “My charger’s in your car.” I’d been steeling myself for what I feared I’d find—the usual parental horror stories scrolling behind my eyes: secret social media dramas, troubling messages, a chaos of neglected responsibilities.
My knuckles hovered. I took a breath, bracing for a confrontation, and pushed the door open.
The scene stopped me cold.
She wasn’t on her phone. She wasn’t scrolling. She was bent over her desk, bathed in the pool of an old architect’s lamp I’d given her years before. Her headphones were on, but music wasn’t leaking out; she was in a silent world of her own making. Spread before her was not schoolwork, but a sprawling, intricate universe of her own creation.
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