and felt like I had gone back twenty-five years.”
Suddenly, I remembered the way he had stared at me that first night.
The look I had misunderstood for months.
“That’s why you kept looking at me like that?”
A sad smile crossed his face.
“I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t imagining it.”
Then Robert reached into the envelope again.
He pulled out another photograph.
My father was holding a little girl who looked about two years old.
Me.
On the back of the photograph, in my father’s handwriting, were the words:
“If anything ever happens to me, please never let my little girl believe that I chose to leave her.”
I sat down and started crying.
For twenty-seven years, I had believed that my father had chosen a life without me.
But he never had.
And the strangest part was that the truth had finally come from
