“Why are you being secretive?”
“I’m not. I’m just busy.”
She dodged me for a week. Then, exactly seven days before her flight, my phone buzzed while I was folding laundry.
It was a photo.
My daughter stood on a London sidewalk in a dark coat, looking pale but smiling. Beside her was a man with silver hair, deep lines in his face, and the kind of expensive overcoat I could recognize even from a blurry picture. He had one hand resting lightly on her back.
I stared at that image so long that my vision blurred.
He was not a professor. He was not a family friend. He was not just “someone from the hospital.”
He looked old enough to have fathered her.
Before I could even type, she called.
