“You don’t get to decide that for me, Dad,” I shot back. “I deserve to know what you did.”
“I told you what I needed to so you’d stop asking questions. So you’d stop looking. I never thought she’d come back after all these years.”
The room was very quiet.
“Dad…”
He finally looked at me.
“I know what I did. I don’t have anything else to say.”
“I deserve to know what you did.”
Dad then reached for my hand. I let him take it because he was still my father, even then.
“I did what I thought I had to.”
It wasn’t an apology.
***
I sat in the kitchen until the sky began to lighten. I wasn’t thinking in any organized way. I was just sitting with it all, the way you sit with something too large to move.
My father had raised me. He’d fed me, held me, and shown up for every hard day.
That was true, and I wasn’t going to pretend it wasn’t.
It wasn’t an apology.
But the woman in that hospital bed had written letters to me every year on my birthday for 32 years, without an address, without any certainty I was even alive to read them.
She’d written them, anyway.
And there was still the question that kept snagging at me: if Mom had chosen a better life and walked away willingly, why had she kept searching? Why were there letters full of a love that didn’t read like someone who had left by choice?
I knew I needed to go back to the hospital. And I knew I wasn’t going alone.
Why had she kept searching?
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