Over breakfast the next morning in my father’s suite I get a text from Kate.

You see the YouTube video of your boyfriend yet???

Frowning down at my phone, I type quickly.

What video? No. Why?

A link explodes onto the text window. Clicking it immediately, my eyes go wide on secret footage that’s shot poorly — clearly amateur — but that’s not the part that matters. In fact, that gives the video more weight.

“Um, Dad?” I whisper, thunderstruck as word-banners flash across video cut together, taken over the span of fourteen days.

Justin Cocker didn’t know we were recording this.

He’d dirtied himself up and wore filthy clothes and shoes with holes in them.

He stayed two whole weeks and never asked for special privileges.

He never even revealed who he really was.

Not even when he left.

Free coats, socks and tampons have been arriving ever since for new ‘guests,’ all from his office address.

“What is it?” my father mutters from behind The New York Times.

“We have a problem.”

Lowering his paper, grey eyebrows knit together. “What problem?”

“Look,” I go to show him the video, but he waves me away.

“Just tell me what it is. I hate those things.”

Taking a deep breath, I stare at my screen again, the video now finished and ready for replay. It’s gone viral even though it was uploaded only yesterday from some guy with no subscribers to his channel. People are passing this out from sheer, organic interest.

“Someone videoed sections of a two-week stint at a homeless shelter in the southwest section of Atlanta where Justin disguised his identity and pretended he was one of them.”

My father blankly stares at me. “Now why would he do a stupid thing like that?”

I explain, “The only way to know what they really needed was to live like they did.”

“Well, that’s just great,” he grumbles, defensively. “I don’t know what that has to do with me.”

“It makes Justin look very good. Like he walks the talk.”

In a burst of fury Dad balls up the newspaper and throws it at a wall. I clamp my mouth shut. He huffs and paces over to stare out his hotel window at the river view. With his hand on the frame he mutters, “I’m not ready to retire.”

“Dad,” I whisper, rising to go to him.

He raises his hand, stopping me from coming closer. “I don’t need to be consoled. I haven’t lost yet.”

“I know, Dad, I was just going to…okay, fine.”

After shaking his head a long while, he rasps, “Do you think I’m out of touch with the people?”

I do think he has lost touch with them, but he’s my father and loyalty won’t let me kick him when he’s down. “You’re going to have to be the judge of this one for yourself.”

With his eyes locked on the future, he mutters, “I believe I know what they need more than they do.”

I can tell by his tone he doesn’t truly think that anymore. He did when we began this campaign trail. Justin has opened my father’s eyes, the same as he’s opened the people’s.

“Are you ready to deliver your speech? I can call for the car to be downstairs waiting for us.”

He nods, his profile strong and somber.

As I dial, he murmurs almost inaudibly, “Thank you, Jaimie. For being here with me. I had a feeling I’d need you here.”

Emotion constricts my throat. “Of course. I’ve got to brush my teeth, so I’m going back to my room. I’ll see you down there.”

Rushing out I struggle against tears, making quick strides down the hotel hallway as I tell the driver we’re ready to go.

A daughter needs her father. I know that truth more than most people do, because I didn’t have one. Not really. After my parents split I saw him maybe two times a year, not the lucky every-other-weekend most kids get. And there’s a hole in my heart from it.

A father helps you feel safe. He teaches you you’re loved and cared for, and he designs the patchwork quilt of all your future relationships with the opposite sex, by how he treats you.

I’ve always felt stunted in matters of the heart. I never once believed it when a boyfriend said he loved me. I couldn’t take them seriously. I’d never felt loved by my dad so I always thought men couldn’t love. I thought they were incapable of it. Because how can you not love your own daughter?

But these months we’ve spent together have shown me my father does care. He just never knew how to show me. He’s stoic and an intellectual. He probably had no idea how to relate to a child, especially a girl who looked so much like the woman who hated him.

I’ll never know why he wasn’t able to be the daddy I needed. I know my grandfather was a violent man. Maybe Dad never learned how to be loving as a result.

But this year has been different. He’s reaching out to me, and I’m trying like hell to let him into my heart. It seems from the tears threatening to fall that he just got in there.

I can’t believe what he just said to me. And what it means. So that’s the real reason why he asked me to come to Atlanta. He’s scared. My father is scared of growing old and becoming irrelevant. He wanted his daughter closer to him, and he didn’t know how to tell me. So he did the one thing he knew — business. He hired me to be here.

It’s so sad it’s almost adorable.

I left Boston because my father needed me.

I just didn’t know how much.