Daniel knocked down his chair and refused to look at him.
Then Michael opened another envelope. There was a laboratory report in it.
“I didn’t come for the apartment or for the money,” he said. “I came here because Robert died with a lie that should not have outlived him.”
“What kind of test is that?” asked Daniel.
„DNK test.“
Daniel wanted to know how Michael came up with his sample.
“You gave it to me three weeks ago,” he replied.
Then I remembered that Daniel had told me that he had ordered a test to research his family ancestry. That was not true. He had already found Michael and tried to verify his claims.
The study found that the probability of a parent-child relationship was more than 99.9 percent.
He wasn’t Daniel’s uncle.
He was his biological father.
Letters that never arrived
Daniel walked out of the kitchen without saying a word. I found him about twenty minutes later sitting on the floor of the guest room. Next to him was Michael’s bag, full of letters.
Each was addressed to Daniel.
Letters for birthdays and Christmases. One was written when he graduated from high school and the other when he got married.
Michael wrote to him for decades, but no letter ever reached him. Robert was hiding them.
After Robert’s death, Michael found out where Daniel lived, but shame and fear prevented him from approaching him for several years.
There was another reason why he finally decided to show up. He was sick. He did not expect to die immediately, but he realized that there was no more time to postpone.
“I didn’t want money,” he said. “I just wanted one chance to tell my son that I hadn’t abandoned him.”
Daniel cried as he held a letter Michael had written to him for his 12th birthday. For the first time since I knew him, my husband looked like a scared boy.
Trust didn’t come back overnight
Michael was gone that morning, but not forever.
It took Daniel a long time to accept what he had learned. Over the next few months, the two met from time to time. First in the kitchen, then in the park, and finally in the kitchen.
