Ten years. And you come back today, of all days.
And he was not wrong. He was the only person on that porch who was not wrong about anything.
It has been fourteen months.
We go about every six weeks. It is eight hours and Leo sleeps most of it.
My father and I are not fixed and I do not know if we will be. He has apologised once, properly, at a kitchen table, and then not been able to look at me for about a day afterwards.
My mother and Leo are a different matter entirely. She has him on the phone twice a week. She has taught him to make something with pastry that I cannot make.
There is a photograph of Rhys on my hallway wall now too. I did not have one for ten years.
Leo knows. All of it, at ten, told properly over about four conversations by me and a woman who does this for a living.
He has been fine and I have not, and that is the correct way round.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a father who threw his pregnant daughter out and got what he deserved on his own porch.
He did that, and he has to live in it, and he knows exactly what he did.
But there is a difference between a secret you are keeping for somebody and a secret you have started to enjoy holding.
Mine changed sides somewhere around the April. I could not tell you the day.
I started out protecting a dying man who had asked me to.
And by the May I was a nineteen-year-old with a letter in a drawer, deciding when two people were allowed to know where their son was.
They took ten years off me. That is true and I will not be talked out of it.
I took two weeks off them, in a room with a shared bathroom, and those two weeks were the only two that were ever going to matter.
If you are holding something because somebody asked you to —
check, every so often, whether they are still the reason.
