A father worried about why his daughter often remained behind in the school bus after others left, so he decided to find answers. What he found was not what he expected.

Benjamin Bruce was a single dad who had to step in to become his child’s mother after she passed away. Their daughter, Emily, had been six when it happened.

Ben loved his daughter because, to him, she was all that was left of his beloved wife, and he had also promised her that Emily would be well taken care of no matter what.

To that end, Ben tried his best to juggle work while being present in his daughter’s life. He had no other family he trusted to look after her, so he had to do everything himself.

The first couple of years were rough on him as a parent, and just as he was acclimatizing to the rollercoaster, his daughter hit puberty, and at that point, things got wilder.

She suddenly started going through physical changes right before his eyes, and he knew what they meant — the boys would be coming for her. How could they not; his daughter had his late wife’s red hair and deep green eyes that seemed designed to mesmerize.

Even Ben was not immune to her eyes and had fallen prey to her will multiple times over the years. When she clocked 12, two years after she hit puberty, Emily discovered boys.

That led to her paying a lot of attention to her hair and appearance because she wanted to look good for her school crush. Ben was prepared to beat back boys with a stick if need be, but what he was not ready for was caring for his daughter’s looks.

Emily had to do that herself, but she was terrible at it with no role model to learn from. Ben often just cut her hair short as a child because he knew nothing about hair care, but he had to respect her wishes to keep her hair longer as she grew older.

There was little he would not do for his child, so to help her, he started brushing her hair when it was long enough. He was a big man, and even though he tried to be gentle, he occasionally pulled it out.

“Ouch!!!!” she yelled one day.

“I’m sorry baby,” he apologized quickly, as he always did.

“You need to be more gentle daddy,” she would admonish him sometimes.

Other times, she just endured the pain because she did not want to make her father feel terrible for causing it. Ben felt the sting of his failure each time his daughter complained of her hair getting pulled out, and that made him try to cut her hair again.

“Just get rid of it all,” he would say when they argued about it sometimes. “Your mom kept her hair cropped short and she still looked wonderful.”

“Daddy, I will no longer cut my hair, look how slow its growth is because of how often you cut it in the past,” she would shoot back. In any case, Ben never won the arguments, but he didn’t need to; they stopped coming up after a short while.

Shortly after that, he noticed that his daughter started getting tardy notices from her class teacher, Mrs. Flynn. So he called the woman to find out.

“That’s right, Mr. Bruce. Your daughter has five tardy notices this week alone. Is there anything going on I should know about?” the woman asked him.