SKELETON BONES Part One: Earn It Raised on the love of three women — a great-grandmother, a grandmother, a mother — and the absence of one man, she spent fifteen years chasing a father who kept promising to show up and kept sending regret instead. Skeleton Bones is a memoir told as fiction: ten chapters tracing a girl from nine years old to her mid-twenties, through broken promises, borrowed hope, and the slow, hard work of learning that being loved and being seen are not the same thing. She wanted her father to know the real her — not the daughter he imagined from a distance. What she got instead was a lesson in earning her own worth. Each chapter ends with a bone — a single hard truth picked clean of everything soft around it. This is a story about what gets passed down, what gets withheld, and what a girl builds for herself when no one hands her a foundation. Part One. Ten chapters. One girl's reckoning with the man who was supposed to show up.