A runaway daughter. A father in distress. A short story that imagines what a parent hopes to never have to…
by: R.E. Hengsterman
He used to count her steps on the stairs.
Seven to the landing, five more to the top, the last one always a leap. In a quiet house, footsteps were radio signals, explosions in the dark, and a father tuned himself to their frequency the way a shipwind listens for foghorns.
When she ran away, he went deaf. The house lost its edges. Bread went stale, floors buckled, and time slid like rain down a windscreen.
He stapled flyers to posts until the staples made a soft halo of rust, then to the co-op’s message board, where they were soon buried beneath Mary Kay gloss and lawn-care promises.
In a year he learned the faces of every clerk at every gas station between here (everywhere) and the state line. He handed his phone number to women who handed it to men who handed it to nobody, a paper migration that never found a nest.
People said: kids come back. People said: kids don’t. The truth held both.
The first sighting didn’t come from a shelter report or a patrol car with kind eyes. It came from a screen smaller than his palm.
“She looks like your girl,” the coworker said, and angled his phone as if sharing a secret.
The secret.
A video looped — fifteen seconds — music tinny and relentless, a body in a rented kitchen dancing the same dance as a million others. A tilt of the chin, a smile that wasn’t a smile. The caption included a hook and a winking promise: full link in bio.
Her face had thinned and learned the camera. Her hair, once a stubborn tangle of childhood, fell in a straight sheet she had ironed into obedience. The clothes were not clothes so much as boundary markers, thin cords around territory that no longer belonged to her.
“Is it her?” the coworker asked when he didn’t answer.
He thought, I counted her steps for a decade. I know the rhythm of her breathing in sleep. I can pick my child from a grainy CCTV still at three hundred yards. What he said was only, “Yes.”
He made an account he didn’t understand to send a message she would not read. He wrote: Come home. He erased it and wrote: I’ll come to you. He erased that and wrote: I love you. The notification never flipped to “seen.”
The second sighting came from a woman at the grocery who had never liked him.
“A friend’s niece found her page,” she said by the apples, her mouth lifting as if gossip were helium, as if it were pure gold.
“She’s got a link to a — well. One of those subscriber things.”
He nodded as if he already knew this, as if fathers were issued manuals, as if manuals had chapters on what to do when the silhouette of your child turns into a brand.
The third sighting came from a parole officer who didn’t like anyone.
“You can’t go where she is,” the officer said on the phone. “You can only stand where you are and hold the line.”
He held. He held until holding became the only thing he knew how to do.
The house wasn’t silent anymore. It was full of other people’s noise. The videos multiplied like ants, each one carrying a crumb of her away. He could not see the room where she slept, the grate that clanked, the couch slumped from too many bodies. He saw what the camera saw: the moment the ring light flipped her eyes into coins, the turn to the good side, the side he remembered from baby pictures though he had never called it that. The choreography was a small religion — hip to left, knee soft, chin down, glance up—devout and weary at once. The comments ticked upward like a Geiger counter in a hot zone.
He went to the police again, and the detective with the soft voice said what he always said: “We can look. We can’t force the door.”
“She was a child when she left,” he cried.
“She’s older now,” the detective said, and the word older lay there like a used napkin, not the same as grown.
He began to recognize the traplines: giveaways and collabs and discount codes linked to discount souls. The girls wore the same sheen and the same exhaustion. He imagined the way the ring light must hum like a distant hive. He imagined a landlord counting cash in another room while the building sighed. He imagined someone older saying, Just this once, and then again.
He started to keep a ledger of sightings, a father’s pseudoscience. Tuesday 9:12 p.m. — white tile, same chipped corner. Thursday noon — green plant in frame, leaves dusty. Sunday 3:03 a.m. — gloss on mouth, tremor on the left hand, edit jump at two seconds.
He wrote letters to people with faces he never saw: Dear whoever taught my child to pose her hunger so it looked like power. Dear whoever bought the ring light. Dear whoever oils the gears of a machine that runs on daughters.
He kept the letters. He mailed nothing.
He learned a new language without wanting it. The bio. The link. The premium. The paywall. The tip. The goal meter that filled with hearts like a hospital monitor for a different kind of life. He learned the way a stranger’s money could be converted into his child’s electric bill, then into her groceries, then into the photographs of her groceries that proved everything was “girl dinner” and nothing was enough. He learned to hate men in hoodies and in suits and in shirts that said Only Fans. He learned to hate women who said, “Baby girl, secure the bag,” while the bag filled with sand.
Neighbors began to pretend not to see him. It is hard to watch a man hold his breath where there is air.
At night he sat at the kitchen table and did father math. Years since the first porch light he left on until the bulb failed. Months since the last voicemail: “Dad, stop.” The number of times he had watched that first fifteen-second video, as if repetition could loosen a knot. He whispered her name until it lost its edges and he had to stop, because names are meant to keep people from drifting into the generic, and he did not want to lose the last of her to pronouns.
One afternoon the mail brought a card addressed in the careful hand of someone who learned cursive at a table where hands were slapped. Inside, three sentences from the mother of a girl who had come back from the same cliff. I saw her too. I told mine I would be here when she was tired. Then I waited.
He moved the card to every room so the house could overhear it.
Then came the day the video was her face and not her body. No music, no coin eyes. The caption was a warning. The hook was a threat.
Stop pretending you know me.
In the comments she wrote: Boundaries. In the video she said nothing. That was its power: a girl looking straight through the lens at a million people who thought they were the lens.
He thought of the last time she had looked at him like that, in a kitchen full of smoke from the grilled-cheese pan she left on too long. He had shouted, fire. She had said, “I am not your girl.” And he had not known there were only a few more steps left to count.
He stopped sending messages.
He went back to work, to the low thrum of machines that obeyed laws you could still look up. He learned to fix the belt on the sander with his eyes closed. He learned to hate the lunch whistle for sounding like an alarm.
The call came from a cousin, because it always does.
“She blocked me,” the cousin said. “But before she did, she posted a story. She said she’d never speak to you again.”
He said thank you like a prayer and ended the call before his voice could confess something it couldn’t retract.
That night he opened the link he had sworn he would not open. He entered his name and a number and his hands shook but not enough to keep him from completing the fields. The confirmation email came with the efficiency of all machines. He clicked again. The gate opened.
The page was cleaner than he had expected. More light. The veneer of control that money buys. In the first post she wore clothes that pivoted on the line between clothing and costume. In the second she didn’t.
In the third she was laughing, not at anything, just laughing to prove she could. He told himself he was here to report. He told himself he was gathering evidence to bring to the detective. He told himself he was looking for clues: the seam of paint on a windowsill, the caged radiator, the particular pucker of cheap blinds.
He told himself a stack of reasons while something inside him fractured like ice in a glass.
He typed: I’m here. He erased it. He typed: It’s me. Erased. He typed her childhood nickname and watched the letters drain of meaning on the screen. He typed nothing, and said everything in his head the way the devout say rosaries — repetition as raft.
A tip jar sat in the corner like an open mouth. He fed it because he had always fed what he loved. The meter blinked thank you in confetti colors he wanted to set on fire.
He scrolled until the walls of the house drew close. He stood. He walked to the sink and ran water and whispered the words he had kept for years and had nowhere to put.
The notification chimed like a silver fork tapped against a glass at a wedding.
Onlyfans: your subscription is active.
He returned to the chair the way men return to church after funerals. He set his fingers on the keys and signed the only name that still belonged to him: Dad.
The platform refused the word like a guard at a door.
He tried Father. Denied. He tried his first initial and last name. Available. He closed the window. He opened it again. He entered a name no one could mistake for anything but what it meant and pressed save.
Welcome, it replied. Welcome, Your Only Fan.
He stared at the screen until light leaked from the edges and the cursor blinked its metronome. He thought of the first step on the stairs, the second, the seventh, the leap. He thought of hands that would not take his, of a girl who had learned to make a living out of people looking and not seeing her.
He lifted his hands and lowered them again. He typed: I’ll be here when you’re tired.
He didn’t send it. He just left it there, a message unsent and more true for it.
Then he did the last hard thing. He looked at his child, as the world had taught men to look, and he didn’t turn away. He took the whole of what he loved and what it cost and held it, the way a burned man holds a pan he has to carry to save a house on fire: arms trembling, skin blaring, refusing to drop it, because there is no other way to keep anything at all.
R.E. Hengsterman, RN, BS, MA, MSN, M.E., is a registered nurse, medical writer, and educator with more than three decades of experience in healthcare. He is the author of the forthcoming nonfiction work The Shift Worker’s Paradox and the second edition of The Paper Boy and The Winter War. A Pushcart Prize–nominated storyteller with over fifty publications in literary journals, he believes science and story are vital to understanding our shared experience. He lives and writes in North Carolina. @TheNurseWhoWrites www.NurseWhoWrites.com
