…my father. Soaked to the skin, no umbrella, holding something small and black in his open palm. I opened the door. He didn’t come in. He just held it out to me. It was a GPS tracker, scratched and dented, with a strip of tape on the back. On the tape, in his handwriting: ANNA.
“I took it out of the wreck,” he said. His voice was barely there. “The police gave me her things. I found it in the dash. I couldn’t throw it away. I keep it charged. I keep it in my coat pocket.” He looked down at it. “When I drive at night, I watch the dot move on my phone. For a few minutes, it’s like she’s out driving again. Like she’s on her way somewhere.”
I couldn’t speak. My father, who never cried at the funeral, was standing on my porch in the rain, crying like a child. “The night of the crash,” he said, “her phone died. It took us three hours to find her. The doctors said if we’d gotten there in the first hour…” He couldn’t finish. “I put a tracker on everybody after that. I know it’s wrong. I know. I just couldn’t lose another one in a ditch somewhere because I didn’t know where you were.”
I brought him inside. I made him tea. I sat next to him on the couch and showed him the account on my phone. Eleven devices. “Dad,” I said gently, “this isn’t safety. This is grief.” He nodded. He knew.
We took them out together, one by one, the next weekend. My car. My brother’s truck. Mom’s. He kept just one. Anna’s. Then my brother and I did something he didn’t expect. We turned on location sharing on our phones, and we shared it with him ourselves. Openly. With our names on it.
He started grief counseling in November. He still drives at night sometimes. But now, when I check my phone and see his little blue dot moving across town, I text him: “Where are you going, Dad?” And he always answers. Usually it’s just: “Driving with Anna. Home soon.”
