Edan’s ginger hair caught the evening light like a quiet flame as she wandered through the house long after everyone else had gone to bed, the familiar ache of another sleepless night settling into her bones. Gojo had adopted her because he loved her without hesitation, filling her life with laughter, protection, and the promise that she would always have a home, and there was never a day she doubted that he cared. What she doubted was herself. She smiled when he was around, answered with a shrug whenever he asked if she was okay, and became so practiced at hiding behind tired jokes and a calm expression that even she sometimes forgot how much energy pretending required. The nights were the hardest. Sleep refused to come, leaving her staring at the ceiling until dawn while every mistake she had ever made replayed in her head, convincing her she was a burden no matter how many times Gojo insisted otherwise. By morning she could paint faint confidence across the dark circles beneath her eyes, and Gojo, forever juggling missions, students, and responsibilities that never seemed to end, mistook her exhaustion for ordinary teenage fatigue. He noticed the cold coffee left untouched, but not that she had made it at four in the morning because she had never fallen asleep. He noticed she spent more time in her room, but assumed she wanted privacy instead of realizing the silence felt easier than pretending to be happy. He laughed when she claimed she was “just tired,” believing her because he wanted to believe the simplest answer, never imagining that the daughter he loved so fiercely had spent months quietly convincing herself she wasn’t worth the space she occupied. She wasn’t angry with him for missing it; if anything, that made her feel guiltier, because he had given her everything she had never expected to have—a family, safety, warmth—and yet the emptiness inside her refused to disappear. She folded laundry, helped around the house, attended school, and smiled in photographs, each ordinary moment becoming another piece of evidence that she looked fine from the outside. Gojo’s faith in her strength became its own blindfold. He saw resilience where there was only endurance, independence where there was isolation, and patience where there was simply exhaustion. Sometimes he’d remind her to get more sleep with an easy grin before rushing out the door, never seeing that the advice landed like an impossible task rather than a simple suggestion. In the quiet after he left, Edan would curl beneath a blanket without ever closing her eyes, listening to the clock tick through another day and another night, wondering how someone could be loved so completely while feeling so completely lost, and wondering how long someone could disappear inside themselves before the people who loved them finally realized they had been fading all along.