She kept cards in a drawer.
One every year.
Father's Day.
His name on the front.
No address on the back.
Jake Clark had two things that mattered: the ability to run and a daughter who believed he would come back. He lost track of both.
A walk-on found his way onto a college track team through sheer will, Jake built something real. A rivalry worth watching, a family worth fighting for, a future that almost held. Then one wrong step ended his career, and the man who didn't know how to be anything other than a runner slowly disappeared from everyone else too.
What follows isn't a comeback. It's a collapse.
Strides Between Us follows Jake from college tracks to city streets, through the years nobody writes about, and back to a starting line he had no right to stand at. It is a novel about fatherhood and failure, about the people who wait and the people who vanish, and about what it costs to disappear and what it takes to face the one you left behind.
Because somewhere, every year, a card was written.
And never sent.