I tapped the sealed envelope resting on the table.
“You can tell the family, Mom, or I’ll read his words out loud at dinner on Saturday.”
She began to cry, but I didn’t move.
For once, I wasn’t the one tidying up the wreckage.
The following days blurred together—Aunt Linda calling with excuses thick in her voice. Pastor Evans stopping me in the grocery store parking lot. “Your mother always wanted the best for you, Tanya.”
I nodded, but that was all I managed.
The day after everything unraveled, I sat at my kitchen table, head in my hands, staring at my mother’s number glowing on my phone. For years—decades—I had asked about my father.
I had pleaded for details.
“He left us,” she’d always reply, flat and distant, never meeting my eyes. “He wasn’t meant for family life.”
She repeated it so often that eventually I stopped asking. Now the questions felt suffocating, pressing against my ribs.
When I called her again, she answered immediately.
“Tanya?”
“Did you ever think about telling me? The truth?”
Silence stretched between us.
“I needed him, Mom. I needed to know.”
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