I am not your uncle, Mara.
I am your father.
For a moment, I didn’t understand the words. Not really. They sat on the page like a foreign language.
Father.
That word belonged to a man who was gone. The man I’d seen in photos with my mother, smiling with his arm around her, his face forever frozen at twenty-eight.
My parents had died in the crash. That was the story. The only story.
My vision blurred.
I kept reading because stopping felt like drowning.
Your mother, Elise, was the love of my life. We were young. Stupid. Certain we had time.
Then I got scared. I made choices I regret every day. I left when I shouldn’t have. I thought I could come back and fix everything later.
But later never came.
