𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑆𝑡𝑜𝑟𝑚 𝐿𝑒𝑓𝑡 𝐵𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑑 // 𝐹𝑎𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟 𝐹𝑖𝑔𝑢𝑟𝑒 & 𝑒𝑐ℎ𝑜

[echo]

 

[echo]

She sat on the old porch swing, her bare feet nudging back and forth against the weathered wood, the evening wind threading through her long, dark locks. The sky stretched out wide and bruised above her, that vast, endless ceiling of what locals, and well, the world called 'Tornado Alley', where the world always seemed just a little too big, too wild to hold. The air smelled of rain and electricity—sharp, sweet, and strangely... comforting. She had spent seventeen springs growing up beneath these furious skies, where the wind could turn cruel in a breath and the sirens were just another part of life, their wailing songs splitting open the peaceful evenings with the promise of storms. Even as a child, before she truly understood what those sirens meant, she had known to trust the sure, steady hand of her father, wrapping gently but firmly around hers. He would guide her into the tiny downstairs bathroom, where they'd sit on a nest of old pillows, a flashlight clutched between them, waiting for the world to right itself again. Her father had been her shield, her constant, her anchor when everything beyond their thin walls threatened to tear itself apart. Joseph had raised her alone, rough hands learning how to braid fine hair and sew buttons as easily as they once built furniture or repaired busted trucks. She never once felt the absence of a mother, not when she had him. Every scraped knee, every heartbreak, every impossible question—he was her first call, her last word. He was the sun her little world orbited around: steady, warm, unfailing. Other girls at school sketched dreamy boys into the margins of their notebooks, whispered about dances and first kisses, but Lila always felt removed from it. No boy could ever match the quiet strength of her father, the way he made even the scariest moments feel small with nothing more than his presence. Every crush wilted under the impossible standard he had set without even knowing it—the patience in his voice, the steadiness in his hands, the kindness stitched into the corners of his smile. Still, time was a restless river, carving its marks whether you wanted it to or not. Each passing year, she caught herself changing—the lines of her face, the slope of her mouth, becoming sharper, more defined. The soft, growing resemblance was undeniable, staring back at her from the faded, sun-bleached photograph tucked away in the top drawer of her dresser. Her mother's face—bright-eyed, a little reckless, a little wild—was a ghost woven into her reflection. Day by day, she found herself looking more and more like the woman she had never known, but had heard of, only through whispers... Sometimes she caught her father staring a little longer than he meant to, something quiet and heavy flickering behind his kind eyes. It wasn't anger... It wasn't disappointment... It was something more complicated, a kind of sorrow stitched through the love he never stopped offering her. She never asked about it. She had questions—questions about the woman who had walked away when she was still a baby, questions about why being a mother had been too much—but she never found the courage to give them voice. Some instinct told her that the answers might hurt words than the wondering. In the alley where the tornadoes roamed free, life teaches a person to build strong roots or be carried away by the storm. And Lila had grown with rooms deep and tangled into the earth, wrapped tightly around the steady, steady, tireless love of the man who had chosen her over and over again, even when it must have broken something inside him. She loved him for it—not just for the nights spent huddled in the porcelain tub while the houses shook around them, but never quite touching their home, not for the Christmas mornings he somehow made magical or the scraped-together birthday parties—but for every quiet, invisible way he protected her, for every day he kept choosing to stay when others hadn't. He was her first hero, her best friend, and her forever safe place. And no matter how much she started to resemble the woman who once walked away, some deep, unspoken part of her knew one thing with certainty—she would never leave him. But sometimes, life has other plans...