She slid a drawing across the desk and pointed at the fifth person.
Dylan had written a name under it in crooked six-year-old letters: DADDY #2.
Dylan is six, and for months he’s woken up crying about a man who watches him sleep from the hallway.
“Mara,” Dr. Whitfield said, “I need you to see this before Dylan comes back in.”
We started bringing him here in September, after his anxiety got bad enough that he stopped eating lunch at school.
My husband Ryan and I split the Tuesday pickups so it’s just Dylan’s hour, no distractions, no phones.
The drawing was our family the way he always draws us. Me on the left, Ryan on the right, Dylan in the middle.
Except this time there were five people.
I laughed. Actually laughed.
Kids invent people, I told her. Imaginary friends, cartoon characters, whatever they see at school.
Dr. Whitfield didn’t laugh back. “Ask him who that is tonight,” she said. “Watch his face when you do.”
At dinner I asked. Dylan stared at his plate and got quiet.
“He’s not supposed to be a secret anymore,” he said. “He comes on the days you do yoga.”
Something cold moved through my chest. I go to yoga every Tuesday morning while Ryan works from home with Dylan in the next room.
I asked what the man looked like. Dylan pointed at his own bicep and said the man had a star there.
Ryan’s father had a tattoo like that. I’d seen it in two old photographs, both from before I ever met the man.
Ryan told me his father died alone in Ohio when Dylan was a baby. No funeral, he said, so we never went.
We have a doorbell camera that saves sixty days to an app on my phone.
I sat in the school pickup line and scrolled back through every Tuesday since September.
Eleven minutes.
A man let himself in with a KEY at 9:47 AM. Ryan opened the door before he even knocked.
My hands were shaking.
The star tattoo.
RYAN’S FATHER WAS ALIVE, and Ryan had been letting him into our house every week for months.
Three Tuesdays in, the footage showed Ryan handing him an envelope at the door before he left.
I called Ryan and told him we needed to talk the second he got home, no excuses.
He didn’t come home until after Dylan was asleep. When I showed him the video, he sat down on our kitchen floor.
“My dad’s not the one you need to be scared of,” he said. “It’s who sent him here.”
For more stories that hit close to home, check out My Daughter Called It Their ‘Secret Game’ and I Didn’t Call Ahead, The Volunteer Nobody Checked, and The Denial Letter Had a Doctor’s Name I’d Never Heard.
