I surprised my parents with a $650,000 oceanfront home for their 40th anniversary. Months later, my phone rang—my mom was crying. My sister’s husband had changed the locks, listed the house for rent… and told my father, “Get out. This isn’t your home.” He thought it was over—until I showed up with one document he never saw coming.

My father was not the kind of man who said “I love you” easily. He fixed things. He got up at four-thirty. He made sure the heat worked. He drove to school board meetings and dentist appointments and college orientation days without ever once complaining about the gas money. He gave love shape instead of words. My mother gave it words enough for both of them.

Every year, on exactly one Sunday in late summer, they drove down the coast and parked somewhere near Pacific Grove or Carmel or whatever roadside pullout had room, and they sat looking at the water with deli sandwiches and cheap coffee and talked about how someday—someday when the mortgage was gone, someday when Claire’s latest emergency was solved, someday when my father stopped carrying everybody’s crisis like a second spine—they wanted a little place by the ocean. Nothing huge. Nothing fancy. Just a porch, a kettle, a bedroom with a window cracked open at night so they could hear the surf.

Someday is one of the most dangerous words in the English language.