Seven-year-old Luna Wakefield had been labeled blind since birth, a diagnosis repeated so often that it became an unshakable identity rather than a medical question.
Doctors spoke with authority, specialists nodded in agreement, and Richard accepted their verdict without challenge, because believing was easier than hoping.
Hope, after all, is dangerous when it has the power to break you twice.
Luna grew up surrounded by soft voices, careful steps, and an environment carefully designed to protect a child who supposedly lived in permanent darkness.
She learned to move slowly, to trust sounds more than sights, and to remain quiet when confusion filled her small mind.
Yet something about her questions never quite matched the diagnosis everyone else accepted so easily.
Daddy, why is it always so dark?” was not a poetic lament, but a logical question from a child trying to understand her world.
That question should have triggered alarm bells years earlier, but instead it was buried under grief, money, and unquestioned authority.
Richard Wakefield was not a cruel man, but he was a broken one, numbed by the sudden death of his wife in a violent car accident.
Her absence hollowed him out, leaving business and fatherhood as mechanical routines rather than emotional connections.
In his mind, accepting Luna’s blindness was part of accepting loss, fate, and punishment all at once.
He trusted doctors more than his own instincts, because instincts required emotional risk he could no longer afford.
Everything changed when Julia Bennett entered the Wakefield household, unnoticed by the press and underestimated by everyone else.
