Before anything else: June 19 is Juneteenth, a federal holiday and a moment of American history worth pausing for. Take a moment. It matters.

Now. Father’s Day is Sunday, June 21, and I want to talk about the single dad in romance, because he is, without question, one of the most effective character setups in the entire genre. (I said what I said, and I’ll say it again in a court of law if necessary.)

Here’s what makes him work: he already knows how to love something more than himself. He did the hardest thing. He opened himself up completely, became completely necessary to someone who needed him completely, and that didn’t destroy him. It changed him. He is, as a result, a man who is unafraid of the kind of love that requires everything.

The only problem is he forgot to apply it to himself.

The heroine walks in and finds a man who has spent so long in the role of dad that he stopped existing in any other role. He’d given up on being someone’s person. Not out of self-pity, just practicality. He had one love story that mattered. He got a child out of it. He was grateful and he was done.

And then she shows up, and his kid likes her immediately (because children in romance novels are unerring judges of character, and I love them for it), and something inside him wakes up that he’d carefully put to sleep.

This is the trope that gets me every time. Not because the child is cute, though they always are. Because watching a man remember that he is allowed to want things for himself is one of the more quietly devastating arcs in fiction.

Small towns are full of men like this. Cross Creek has more than its share. If the gruff-but-good-hearted hero is your thing, Broken Hart is where the Hart brothers start.

Happy Father’s Day to all the dads who show up. You know exactly who you are.