I went to see my dad today, finally. It was about work, of course, the kind of thing that used to fill up all my days, but now... well, now it just feels like air. I laid out the whole plan, all the charts and figures, and he just looked at me like I was a stranger at a board meeting, polite but distant. He kept calling me "ma'am." The silence after I finished was so loud it rang in my ears, louder than any applause I ever got. What did I even build, all those years, if not a way to be remembered by the one person who mattered?