**Part 2**
At first, everything looked normal.
The dashcam faces forward, out through the windshield, but it has a second small lens that records the inside of the car. The screen showed the road ahead on one side and the front seats on the other. Ellie was driving, both hands on the wheel at ten and two, just the way Patrick had taught her, her face serious and focused in the dashboard light. Patrick was in the passenger seat with his hands folded in his lap.
They were driving through town, down Bass Lake Road past the Target and the Caribou Coffee, all familiar, normal, ordinary. Ellie signaled at every turn. She came to a complete stop at every stop sign. Patrick said, “Nice,” every once in a while, quietly.
Then they turned onto the on-ramp for Interstate 94, heading northwest, away from the city. Ellie merged carefully. The highway was dark and almost empty, just a few red taillights far ahead. Snow flurries danced in the headlights.
For a few minutes, nobody spoke. Then Patrick shifted in his seat. He turned toward her. His face in the dashboard light was more serious than I’d ever seen it.
“Sweetheart,” he said. “Your mom can never know about this.”
My heart nearly stopped.
I put my hand over my mouth. I sat frozen at the kitchen table at two in the morning with my laptop glowing in the dark, and I listened to my husband tell my sixteen-year-old daughter that her mother could never know.
I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself I was tired and scared and jumping to the worst conclusion. But my hands were already shaking.
And what happened next made them shake so hard I could barely hold the edge of the table.
On the screen, Ellie didn’t take her eyes off the road. “I know,” she said quietly.
Patrick shook his head. “No, kiddo. Let me finish.” He took a breath. “Your mom can never know about this from anybody but you. Not from me. Not from him. Not from some aunt at a funeral. From you.”
He looked out the windshield at the highway. “I’ve been thinking about it all week,” he said. “I shouldn’t have agreed to keep it secret. I know why you asked me to. But this is too big, Ellie. She’s your mom. She was there for every one of those birthdays at the window, before I ever showed up. She deserves to hear it from you.”
Ellie’s hands tightened on the wheel. On the screen, I could see her chin starting to tremble.
“She’s going to be so mad,” she said. “At me. For going behind her back.”
“She might be,” Patrick said gently. “For a little while. That’s okay. Mad doesn’t last. But if she finds out after it’s too late, after he’s gone, that’s the kind of thing that sits in a family for twenty years.”
After he’s gone.
I didn’t understand. I sat at the kitchen table and stared at the screen, and I didn’t understand anything.
On the screen, Ellie was quiet for a long time. The highway signs went by in the headlights. Rogers. Albertville. Monticello. Then a big green sign: St. Cloud, 23. She put on her blinker and changed lanes carefully.
“Okay,” she said finally. “I’ll tell her. After Thanksgiving.”
“Okay,” Patrick said.
“Will you be there? When I tell her?”
“Every second,” Patrick said.
They drove on in silence for another twenty minutes. I couldn’t stop watching. Then Ellie took exit 167, the one Patrick had mumbled in his sleep. She drove through the dark streets of St. Cloud, past closed shops and a gas station and a hospital with a big lit red cross on top.
Then she turned into a small parking lot in front of a low brick building with warm yellow lights in the windows and a sign out front, lit by a single spotlight in the falling snow.
CentraCare Hospice House. St. Cloud.
My hands started shaking so hard I knocked my coffee mug over, and cold coffee spread across the table. I didn’t even notice.
On the screen, Ellie put the car in park and turned off the engine. She sat there for a moment with her hands in her lap. “Is he going to know me tonight?” she asked. “Last time he kept calling me Becca.”
Patrick put his hand on her shoulder. “The nurse said he’s having a good day,” he said. “He’ll know you.”
Ellie wiped her eyes, took a deep breath, and opened the car door. The camera kept recording the empty parking lot and the snow falling through the spotlight onto the sign: CentraCare Hospice House.
I sat at the kitchen table and stared at that sign until it blurred. I knew who was inside that building. Only one person in the world would have called my daughter by my name.
I hadn’t seen or heard from Travis Holt in nine years.
The last time was a phone call when Ellie was seven. He’d called on her birthday, late, at nine o’clock at night, after she’d already gone to bed. He was slurring. He said he’d been meaning to come. He said he’d gotten her something. He said he’d mail it. He never did.
After that, nothing. I heard things through mutual friends over the years. That he’d moved to Duluth. That he’d lost his job at a car dealership. That he’d been arrested twice for drunk driving. That he’d been in and out of treatment programs. I tried not to listen. I’d built a whole life around not thinking about Travis Holt, and I was very good at it.
I watched every video on that memory card that night. I sat at the kitchen table until the sun came up, with spilled coffee drying on the table and my laptop glowing, and I watched my husband and my daughter drive to St. Cloud and back eleven times over three weeks.
The first video was dated October 30th. It was a Friday lesson, the normal kind. They’d been practicing on residential streets. Then, near the end, Ellie pulled over into a church parking lot and turned off the engine.
“Dad,” she said, “can I tell you something?”
She told him that a week earlier she’d gotten a message on Instagram from a woman she didn’t know. The woman’s name was Linda Holt, and she said she was Travis’s mother. Ellie’s grandmother. A grandmother Ellie had never met.
Linda wrote that Travis was very sick. Liver failure, from the drinking. He’d been sober for almost two years, she said, but it was too late. The doctors said he had weeks, maybe a month or two at most. He was in hospice in St. Cloud.
And he’d been asking for Ellie. Every day.
On the screen, Ellie was crying in the church parking lot. “She sent me a picture,” she said, and she held out her phone to Patrick. The dashcam couldn’t see it. “Of him. He’s so yellow, Dad. And thin. He doesn’t look anything like the pictures Mom has.”
“Do you want to see him?” Patrick asked quietly.
Ellie didn’t answer for a long time. “I don’t know,” she said finally. “Part of me wants to scream at him. Part of me wants to never see him again. And part of me…” She stopped. “Part of me is still sitting at the window.”
Patrick was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “Have you told your mom?”
Ellie shook her head fast. “I can’t. Dad, I can’t. You don’t know what he did to her. She won’t even say his name. If I tell her I want to see him, she’s going to think I’m choosing him over her. Over you.” Her voice cracked. “She’s going to think I’m betraying her.”
“She won’t think that,” Patrick said.
“You don’t know that.” She wiped her face. “Please, Dad. Please don’t tell her. Not yet. I just need to see him once, and figure out what I feel, and then I’ll tell her. I promise.”
On the screen, I watched my husband stare out the windshield for a long time, his jaw tight. I could see him struggling.
“Once,” he said finally. “I’ll drive you up once, and then we tell her together.”
It wasn’t once.
The second video, November 1st, showed the first trip. Ellie drove the whole way to St. Cloud with Patrick talking her through every merge, every lane change, every exit. When they got to the hospice, she sat in the parking lot for twenty minutes before she could make herself get out of the car.
The camera didn’t record what happened inside. But it recorded the drive home.
Ellie was in the passenger seat this time, too upset to drive. Patrick drove. For the first ten minutes, she just cried. Then she started talking.
“He knew me,” she said. “The second I walked in. He was so small, Dad. He used to be so big. He used to carry me on his shoulders. I remember that. I didn’t think I remembered anything, but I remember that.”
Patrick didn’t say anything. He just drove.
“He said he was sorry,” Ellie said. “He said it like fifty times. He said he used to drive to my softball games and sit in the parking lot. That he watched me play through the fence. That he was too ashamed to come in.” She was sobbing now. “He said he drove past our house on my birthday every year. Every year, Dad. He said he saw me in the window.”
My hands were shaking on the laptop. I had to stop the video for a minute and put my face in my hands.
On the screen, after a long silence, Ellie said, “He asked if I’d come back.”
Patrick’s voice was very quiet. “What did you say?”
“I said I’d think about it.” She looked over at him. “Is that okay? Is it okay if I want to come back?”
And my husband, the man who stayed, who braided her hair and bought her forty-two dollars’ worth of pads and cried in the garage when she called him Dad, said, “Of course it’s okay, kiddo. He’s your father.”
There were nine more videos after that.
Nine more trips to St. Cloud. Ellie driving there, Patrick driving home. Ellie getting better on the highway every time, more confident in the snow, merging without flinching. And Ellie getting quieter on the drives home, as the man in the hospice bed got weaker.
In one video, she told Patrick that Travis had given her a box. Inside was a pink bicycle bell, still in its plastic package, the price tag from 2011 still on it. He’d bought it for her third birthday, he said, along with a bike he’d had to return because he couldn’t make the payment. He’d kept the bell for thirteen years.
In another video, she told Patrick that Travis had asked about him. “He asked who taught me to drive,” she said. “I told him you did. And he cried, Dad. He said, Good. That’s good. I’m glad it was somebody who stayed.”
The last video was the one I’d started with. November 19th. Tonight.
I watched it all the way through this time: the drive up, Patrick’s speech about telling me, the hospice parking lot. Then, an hour and ten minutes later, the drive home.
Ellie drove home that night. She insisted. Patrick asked if she was okay to drive, and she said, “I need to do something with my hands.”
She was quiet until they got back onto I-94. Then she said, without looking at him, “He’s not going to make it to Thanksgiving. The nurse said. Maybe a few days.”
“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Patrick said.
“He asked me to call him Dad,” Ellie said. Her voice was flat and strange. “Tonight. He held my hand, and he asked if I’d call him Dad. Just once. Before he goes.”
Patrick didn’t say anything. In the dashboard light, I saw his jaw tighten and his hand curl into a fist on his knee. Then he made it relax again, finger by finger.
“What did you say?” he asked.
Ellie didn’t answer for a long time. They passed the Monticello exit, then Albertville.
“I said I already have one,” she said finally. “I said, I’m sorry, Travis. I already have a dad.”
On the screen, Patrick turned his face away toward the passenger window. His shoulders were shaking.
“And then I felt so terrible,” Ellie said, crying now. “Because he’s dying, Dad. And he looked so sad. And I thought, what if that’s the last thing I ever say to him? I already have a dad? What kind of person says that to someone who’s dying?”
Patrick wiped his face with the back of his hand. When he spoke, his voice was rough. “Ellie,” he said. “You know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you can have two,” he said.
Ellie looked over at him. The car drifted a little, and she corrected.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Patrick said. “I’m your dad. That doesn’t change. But he’s your dad too. He’s the one who made you. And he’s the one who’s sorry. And he’s the one who’s dying.” He took a breath. “You can give him that, kiddo. It doesn’t take anything away from me.”
Ellie was sobbing so hard I was afraid for a second she’d have to pull over. But she didn’t. She kept both hands on the wheel, ten and two, the way he taught her.
“Will you come in with me next time?” she asked. “When I tell him?”
“If you want me to,” Patrick said.
“I want you to,” Ellie said.
Then they were back in Maple Grove, turning onto our street, pulling into our driveway with the snow falling in the headlights. Ellie put the car in park, and she put her face down on the steering wheel and cried, and Patrick reached over and squeezed her hand.
Then the camera caught it: Ellie’s head coming up, her eyes going to the front window. To me, standing there watching.
“Mom’s at the window,” she whispered.
Patrick looked. “It’s okay,” he said. “We’ll tell her soon. I promise.”
The video ended.
