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
the man whose behavior had made me uncomfortable for months.
That evening, when Jake came home, he found Robert and me sitting together at the table.
Old photographs were spread out in front of me.
Robert’s eyes were red.
Jake looked between us, confused.
“What happened?”
I looked at Robert.
For the first time, the way he looked at me didn’t make me uncomfortable.
I finally understood who he had really been seeing every time he looked into my eyes.
Then I slowly turned toward Jake and said,
“Your father just told me the truth about the man I misunderstood my entire life.”
My own father.
