“You kept that card for all these years?”
“In a drawer. In every apartment I moved to.” Victor wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I couldn’t throw it away, and I couldn’t bring myself to face you. So I kept watch from a distance. I knew where Hannah went to school. I knew when she got that job at the coffee shop.”
“You spied on us.”
“I checked on you,” he said softly. “It’s not the same thing, and it’s not enough. I know.”
“You spied on us.”
I looked down and thought of the envelope and Hannah’s photo tucked inside Luke’s card.
“Three days ago,” Victor said, “I sat at a table outside that coffee shop and took her picture at the same time you took it. Hannah was laughing with a customer. She looked so much like Luke; it stopped my heart. I put the photo in the card the way he’d meant to. And I dropped it in your mailbox a day ago, before I could change my mind.”
“And now you show up? Today? On her birthday?”
“She looked so much like Luke.”
“Look, Daphne, I am here because Luke asked me to be.” He held up the wrapped gift. “Not just to deliver a card. To actually be here. I’ve spent years being a coward. I don’t want to spend another day doing that.”
I stared at him. The man who’d walked out, leaving me with a five-year-old and an 18-year-old. The man who’d let our son carry a family on his back.
