at Mom.
“I didn’t answer.”
That admission seemed more difficult than everything else he had told us.
“Why?”
“Because every year that passed made answering harder.”
I understood that immediately.
Delay created its own gravity.
The longer you avoided something, the more important the eventual explanation seemed required to be.
Soon a simple sentence—I’m sorry—felt too small.
So you said nothing.
Dad had spent weeks hoping Derek would fix his mistakes silently.
Derek had spent months trying to replace borrowed money before confessing.
And Dad himself had spent decades doing
