“He’s not my uncle,” I replied. “He’s my father. And he doesn’t know.”
Julian didn’t try to fix anything. He simply held me while I cried, letting the weight of it settle.
After a while, he asked, “Do you want to see him?”
I thought about every memory I had of Jackson. The way he laughed easily. The way he always remembered my birthday. The way he once told me I had familiar eyes, though he couldn’t place why.
“Yes,” I said. “I need to see him.”
We went the next day.
He opened the door with the same warm smile he had always had. His wife, Rebecca, greeted me from the kitchen. Their daughters’ voices drifted down from upstairs.
The house felt full of life, full of history, full of something complete.
I had planned what to say. I had rehearsed it in my head the entire drive.
But sitting there, surrounded by his family, listening to him speak about Leah with genuine admiration, something in me shifted.
He didn’t know.
And in that moment, I realized what telling him would do. It would not just give me answers. It would unravel everything he believed about his own life.
So instead, I said something else.
