“You knew where he was?”
“For a little while.”
“You knew where my father was, and you never told me?”
“Harper—”
“Twenty years, Naomi!”
“I was sixteen!”
“But you got older!”
“So did you!”
“You could have told me!”
“I promised Mom.”
I stood up so fast the chair tipped over.
“Everybody promised Mom! Apparently I’m the only person in this family who wasn’t allowed to know anything!”
Naomi started crying.
I didn’t care.
Not then.
I grabbed the photograph.
“Where was he?”
“Dayton.”
“What happened?”
“He contacted Mom through a lawyer because technically his consent was needed for part of my adoption paperwork that had never been finalized correctly.”
I frowned.
“You were already adopted.”
“There was a problem with one of the filings. It’s complicated.”
“And he agreed?”
“Yes.”
“Did he ask about me?”
Naomi didn’t answer.
That was the moment something inside me broke.
“Did he ask about me?”
“No.”
One word.
Two letters.
Twenty years of fantasies died with it.
There was more.
Raymond had known exactly where we lived.
He had known Mom’s phone number.
He knew my school district.
He signed documents that included our address.
He simply chose not to contact me.
Not once.
Not on my birthdays.
Not at Christmas.
Not when I graduated.
Not when I turned eighteen.
There had been no mystery.
No tragic accident.
No father desperately searching for his daughter.
He had walked away.
And kept walking.
Naomi told me she had confronted him when she was sixteen.
She wanted to know why he abandoned her mother.
Why he abandoned Mom.
Why he abandoned me.
His answer?
“I wasn’t built for family life.”
Naomi said he spoke about us like we were jobs he had quit.
She left after ten minutes.
A year later, she discovered he had moved to Arizona.
She never saw him again.
I slid down the wall until I was sitting on the basement floor.
For most of my life, I had wondered what was wrong with me.
Was I too difficult?
Had my parents fought because of me?
Had Dad looked at his five-year-old daughter and decided freedom was better?
