Attorney Hayes led me upstairs. The bedroom at the end of the hall was dim, expensive, and heavy with the smell of antiseptic. The man in the bed was smaller than the legend built around his name, but his eyes were still sharp enough to cut.
“Selena,” he whispered. “You have your mother’s eyes.”
Those words should have mended something.
Instead, they split something open.
Because they meant he knew. He had always known.
So I asked him why. Why he let me grow up alone. Why he let me believe I belonged to no one. Why he let me become a ghost while his name stayed polished, honored, and untouched.
He looked at me for a long time and said, very quietly, “Because you were safer without me. Safer if the world believed you were gone.”
One sentence.
A wound.
A locked door.
Before I could drag the rest out of him, his eyes closed. The bedroom door opened almost at once, and Michael stepped in hard enough to force me back into the hallway like I was a stain he meant to keep off the family carpet.
