The cherry blossom tree in our backyard has bloomed and withered for the third time since our dad, Emad Shargi, was first taken hostage in Iran.

Our father, an American citizen who was born in Iran and left as a child, had returned alongside our mother temporarily to reconnect with the country of his birth. Three years ago, on the night of April 23, 2018, roughly 15 people stormed our grandmother’s house in Tehran and took our dad to Evin Prison, where he was held for eight months on fabricated charges. He was released on bail in December 2018 and declared innocent by the Iranian government the following December. Despite this, his passport was withheld, and he was prohibited from leaving Iran. We continued to wait.

This year, on Jan. 18, we were hit by the news that our father had been rearrested on bogus charges in December 2020. He had been convicted without a trial, on charges he had never seen and was completely innocent of. Our world had been torn apart, our father stolen from us again.

As we write this, he should be here with us, barbecuing in the backyard of the house he has lived in for more than 20 years, wearing one of his colorful aprons and whistling along to Classical WETA. Instead, he is in a cell. Nobody has been able to see him in nearly five months. He is trapped in terrible conditions during a deadly pandemic and is being refused a vaccine. We have no way of knowing how he is, except for a couple of short, monitored phone calls.

We feel powerless, left to fight for him the only way we know how — sharing who our dad is and what has happened to him:

The pain our family has gone through over the past three years is indescribable. Five days after he was first taken, Hannah turned 19. She spent her birthday crying and afraid, unsure of when she would see our dad again. Less than a month later, Ariana graduated from university, with our dad imprisoned and our mom still in Iran desperately trying to figure out why her husband had been taken. Our dad, who read every college essay we both wrote, who had been present for every soccer game and musical with flowers in hand, was robbed of the opportunity to be at both of his daughters’ college graduations. His proudest moments were taken from him, while he was played as a pawn in a political game he was not a part of.

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We spend every second missing our father and worrying about his health and well-being. Each day, we walk past American University, thinking of the day our dad helped Hannah move into her dorm, proud tears in his eyes as he said goodbye. We drive the same streets he took us to school on as kids, as we badly sang along to the Beatles’ “Penny Lane” while he made jokes from the front seat. We sit at the very dining room table where, every morning of our childhood, he made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches cut into perfect triangles.

Our dad has missed countless milestones in both of our lives. But that’s not the worst part. The worst part is all the small moments we can’t share with him: wanting to show him a new song and not being able to; our mom burning the pan while cooking and not being able to laugh about it with him; not being able to introduce him to the dog we recently adopted, Olive. The worst part is that we haven’t hugged our dad in over three years, and that we don’t know when we will again. The worst part is thinking of a future without him.

The only thing we want, and all we pray for, is for our dad to come home safely and soon.

As talks with Iran are underway in Vienna, we echo our mother and beg that people like us are not forgotten:

We are calling on the U.S. government to do everything in their power to bring home our dad and the other American hostages being unjustly detained in Iran: Siamak Namazi, Baquer Namazi and Morad Tahbaz. The detention of American citizens for political leverage is a continued pattern, and their freedom and return home should be the top priority during ongoing nuclear talks and other negotiations.

To President Biden: We know you understand better than anyone the pain of a father being separated from his children. Please don’t let our dad be forgotten. We also ask the international community to persevere in seeking justice for these individuals torn away from their loved ones. Finally, we are pleading with the Iranian government to return our father safely to us.

Until then, we will continue to wait here in the home that he raised us in, hoping he will be with us to see the cherry blossoms bloom next year.