When she lowered the letter into her lap, her tears had already blurred the ink. It wasn’t affection in the way she had always longed for, not the embrace she had imagined as a child, not the warmth she had prayed for at his bedside. But it was something, a fractured attempt at care, a final gesture from a man who could never untangle himself from his past.
For the first time in her life, Miriam felt the shape of an answer settle in her chest. It didn’t heal the wounds, but it explained them. And in its own strange way, that was the closest her father had ever come to love.