Valerica Steele Dad Here

“I know.”

A long silence. Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a small glass vial, half-filled with what looked like liquid moonlight. “I found what I was looking for, Val. The door between worlds? It’s real. But it doesn’t open both ways unless someone holds it from the other side.”

Her father’s handwriting.

The letter arrived in a pale blue envelope, the kind people used for wedding invitations or sympathy cards. No return address. Inside, a single photograph: a man standing in front of a lighthouse, fog curling around his boots like something alive. On the back, in handwriting she hadn’t seen in fifteen years: “He’s waiting for you, Val. Come home.”

He’d spent fifteen years proving everything was.