I looked down at Daniel’s letter again.
My hands were shaking so badly that the paper rattled.
I forced myself to continue.
“Your father, Michael, was my closest friend.
I was nineteen when I started working beside him.
He was older than me, but he treated me like a younger brother.
The day of the accident, I made a mistake.
A serious one.
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Your father saw what was happening before I did.
He pushed me out of danger.
He didn’t make it out himself.”
I covered my mouth.
The lawyer quietly sat on the floor beside me.
I kept reading.
“I spent years believing I had stolen your father from you.
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Your mother never blamed me.
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But I blamed myself every single day.”
My vision blurred with tears.
Suddenly, memories I had never understood began returning.
Birthday cards with no return address.
An envelope of money that appeared when my mother couldn’t pay the electricity bill.
The anonymous scholarship that covered my first year of college.
The deposit for my first apartment that my mother always claimed came from an “old family friend.”
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I kept reading.
“That old family friend was me.”
I gasped.
The lawyer looked at me but said nothing.
Daniel had been there.
Not physically.
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Not openly.
But quietly.
