My stepdad raised me after I lost my mother — just hours before he d*ed, he gripped my hand and whispered, “There’s something I’ve hidden from you your entire life.”

I let him hug me.

I kept my hands at my sides.

He stepped back and looked at my face with an expression of deep, practiced sorrow.

“I’m so sorry.

He was a good man.

The best I ever knew.”

“He was,” I said.

“Come in.”

We sat at the kitchen table.

I had made coffee.

Gerald wrapped both hands around his mug the way he always did, and for a moment he looked so familiar, so ordinary, so completely like the uncle I had known for forty years, that something in my chest pulled hard in the wrong direction.

Then I thought about Catherine Reyes.

“I’ve been going through some of his things,” I said.

“He left a lot of papers.”

“That sounds like Frank.” Gerald smiled.

“He kept everything.

Birthday cards from 1987, I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“I found some things I didn’t expect.”

A small shift.