I always felt a distance from my dad. Not cold — just distant.
When I was 30, my mom finally told me why.
She’d had me before meeting him. And he’d raised me like his own.
When I asked him about it, he looked me in the eye and said, “I didn’t have to be your father. I chose to be.”
And somehow, that made it even more meaningful.
11. The Letter She Left Behind
After my grandmother died, we found a letter tucked into her Bible.
It was addressed to no one. But it told of a child she had lost before my mother was born — a baby girl, unnamed, unburied, unspoken of.
She wrote, “I held you once. And every day since.”
No one ever knew.
But now we do.
