Diligence
He woke up every day at 4:30 AM, long before dawn could touch his windows. The world was quiet then. His laptop hummed as he typed in the dark kitchen, coffee burning his tongue awake.
“Daddy, are you coming to my game today?” his son asked once, sleepy-eyed in dinosaur pyjamas.
“Daddy’s working,” he said firmly.
That weekend, his daughter made pancakes by herself. She burned the first batch and scraped the blackened edges into the sink with her little pink spatula. He didn’t notice. He was in the office upstairs, headset clamped to his skull, nodding into spreadsheets while she ate alone at the counter.
His wife used to leave him notes: Remember to breathe today honey or We miss you down here Richard. She stopped when she realised he never read them.
He told himself hard work was love and that money meant safety.
That exhaustion was the price good fathers paid.
Years blurred by. He missed her birthday. Their anniversary. His son’s first heartbreak. His daughter’s art exhibition. He missed the way his wife started sleeping with her back turned to him, cuddling emptiness.
“Daddy’s working,” he said, every time they asked for him.
Until one day, they didn’t.
He came down at midnight for another coffee refill and found the house silent. Their shoes were gone from the hallway rack. Their coats were gone from the hooks. The fridge was empty. There were only crumbs where they’d eaten their last breakfast without him.
On the kitchen island sat her wedding ring in a small white dish. Beside it lay a note in her neat, exhausted handwriting:
You were always working for us. But you were never with us. We can’t keep living like strangers in your house.
He didn’t sleep that night. He sat in the living room, staring at the photo of them smiling on the mantel, eyes red, breathing ragged. At dawn, he drove to his office, worked twelve straight hours and came home to silence again.
Every day after that, he woke up before dawn to work because diligence was all he had left. He worked through the birthdays he no longer knew. Through anniversaries that no longer belonged to him. Through Christmases spent alone. Through the day his wife passed away due to alcohol poisoning. Through the night his son took his life. Through the day his daughter graduated university without a single family member in the crowd.
He worked until his hands trembled and his chest burned. Until his heart gave out one grey Monday morning at his desk. They found him slumped over his keyboard, spreadsheets open, phone buzzing with calls he’d never answer.
At his funeral, the office sent a bouquet of white lilies with a ribbon that read:
“To our most diligent employee.”
His daughter didn’t come.
