Attorney Hayes led me upstairs. The bedroom at the end of the hall was dim, expensive, and heavy with the smell of antiseptic. The man in the bed was smaller than the legend built around his name, but his eyes were still sharp enough to cut.
“Selena,” he whispered. “You have your mother’s eyes.”
Those words should have mended something.
Instead, they split something open.
Because they meant he knew. He had always known.
So I asked him why. Why he let me grow up alone. Why he let me believe I belonged to no one. Why he let me become a ghost while his name stayed polished, honored, and untouched.
He looked at me for a long time and said, very quietly, “Because you were safer without me. Safer if the world believed you were gone.”
One sentence.
A wound.
A locked door.
