“They found the letter. They hate me now,” I said, my voice breaking on the last word.
I knew him immediately.
He studied me for a moment. “How bad?”
“They packed my things into a moving truck. They locked the door.”
John let out a slow breath and glanced back inside. Then he took his keys from the hook by the door.
“Then it’s time. Let’s go.”
John drove behind me the entire way. When we arrived, Angela opened the door and looked from him to me, confusion flickering across her face before anger took its place.
“How bad?”
“Sweetheart, he’s… he’s your father,” I said.
I watched her expression shift through four emotions in the span of seconds.
“Our father?” Nika asked from behind her.
“Please,” I said. “Just hear him out. That’s all I’m asking.”
John stepped forward with the steady calm of someone who had imagined this moment for 20 years.
“Before you say anything else to her,” he said, “you need to know what actually happened.”
“Sweetheart, he’s… he’s your father.”
He told them that when he had located the adoption and written to me, I had replied. That I had wrapped up two infant girls and driven across town one Wednesday afternoon and placed them in his arms in his living room.
“I knew what you smelled like,” he said, his voice lowering. “I knew what your hair felt like. I held both of you.”
Angela’s hand flew to her mouth. Nika stood completely still.
“And then I handed you back,” John admitted. “Because I was getting married, and I told Jessie my fiancée hadn’t signed up for two newborns, and I wasn’t ready.”
“I knew what you smelled like.”
“You didn’t want us?” Angela asked.
“I had reasons. None of them were good enough. I told Jessie to keep raising you. I promised to help her when I could. Then I spent 20 years watching from the edges of your lives and telling myself that was the best I could do.”
The girls exchanged a look. Angela’s chin trembled.
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