I spent 34 years believing my mother abandoned me to chase a different life. My father said it so many times, and in so many ways, that it started feeling like fact. Then, three nights ago, a woman in a hospice bed grabbed my badge and said the words that would go on to haunt me.

The following morning, I told Dad that we were going to the hospital together and that he didn’t get to say no.

There was a long pause, and then he said, “Alright.”

Dad looked smaller when he sat in the passenger seat with his hands in his lap and didn’t say much.

At the hospital, I went straight to the nurses’ station and asked for the patient in room 14.

The nurse looked at her screen. “She was discharged about an hour ago.”

It felt like I’d missed a step in the dark.

“She was discharged about an hour ago.”

I explained, as calmly as I could manage, what had happened. She looked at me for a moment, then at my father, then wrote something on a small piece of paper and slid it across the counter without a word.

I looked at the address. Then at my father.

“Let’s go, Dad.”

***

The neighborhood was on the east side of town, where the houses sat close together and the yards were small.

We pulled up in front of a pale yellow house with a porch that sagged slightly on one side and a pot of dead flowers by the front step.

Dad was very still beside me.

We pulled up in front of a pale yellow house.