The crack wasn’t loud. That’s the part that still haunts me.
It wasn’t a dramatic explosion of metal — just a thin, humiliating click that sent me crashing onto the pavement. A sound so small, yet it tore open a part of my past I thought I had buried for good.

The collie didn’t attack me. It barreled out of nowhere, wild and ecstatic, the way dogs do when they mistake the world for a playground. One wrong angle, one frantic leap — and the fragile machinery that held me together gave way.

People gasped. Phones came out. Someone laughed. Someone apologized.
Funny how the crowd always reacts first, and thinks later.

The dog whimpered beside me, as if it understood it had touched something sacred — or broken something irreplaceable. But the truth is, the prosthetic wasn’t the real fracture that day.
The real break happened inside my chest, the moment a memory of my father surfaced like a ghost pulled into daylight.

You see… he wasn’t the man people assumed he was.
Even I didn’t understand him until it was too late.

He moved like someone trained to calculate threats.
He spoke like a man who knew danger intimately.
And when he taught me to walk on that first prosthetic, it felt nothing like a father teaching a child — it felt like a soldier preparing a recruit.

“Never trust the ground,” he once told me. “It can betray you faster than a human.”

I laughed at him then.
Now? That sentence burns.

When he died, they blamed his heart.
But men with ordinary hearts don’t leave behind sealed files, coded notes, or friends who show up at night and never use their real names. They don’t whisper warnings into taped messages that feel like prophecies.

His final words to me still make the air colder:

“If something happens to me, protect your left side. That’s where you’re weakest.”

But life took my right leg instead.
So tell me — was he wrong, or did he know something I still don’t?

As I lay on that asphalt, surrounded by strangers who saw only a broken limb, I felt something shift — as if the ground itself had finally delivered a message meant for me.

It wasn’t the dog.
It wasn’t the fall.
It was the reminder I never wanted:

My father’s world didn’t die with him.
Its shadows have been trailing me this whole time, quiet and patient.

And the moment that prosthetic snapped, it felt less like an accident…
and more like the beginning.

A door opening.
A past returning.
A truth demanding to be faced — whether I’m ready or not.