One of them was Robert, probably around twenty-five years old.
I didn’t recognize the other man.
But when I looked closely at his face, a chill ran through my entire body.
He had my eyes.
My nose.
Even the same smile.
The photograph nearlyurm slipped from my hands.
“Who is this?”
Robert sat down.
“His name was David.”
I said nothing.
“He was your father, Emily.”
The room seemed to move around me.
“No. My father left us.”
Robert slowly shook his head.
“He didn’t leave you.”
His eyes filled with tears.
“David was my best friend. More like a brother. After you were born, you were almost all he talked about.”
I could barely breathe.
Robert explained that when I was two years old, he and my father had traveled together for work.
There had been a terrible accident on the road.
David had died.
Robert had survived.
“For years, I blamed myself,” he said quietly. “Afterward, your mother took you and moved away. She wanted nothing to do with anyone connected to that period of her life. I had no idea where either of you had gone.”
I stared at him.
“And now?”
Robert looked directly at me.
“When Jake brought you here for the first time, I looked into your eyes and felt like I had gone back twenty-five years.”
Suddenly, I remembered the way he had stared at me that first night.
The look I had misunderstood for months.
“That’s why you kept looking at me like that?”
A sad smile crossed his face.
“I was trying to convince myself that I wasn’t imagining it.”
Then Robert reached into the envelope again.
He pulled out another photograph.
My father was holding a little girl who looked about two years old.
Me.
On the back of the photograph, in my father’s handwriting, were the words:
“If anything ever happens to me, please never let my little girl believe that I chose to leave her.”
I sat down and started crying.
