And there is one more thing I have to put down, because people keep making me sound better than I am.
That Saturday was not a coincidence.
Leo asked to meet them. That is true.
I picked the day.
It was the tenth anniversary. I knew there would be people in that house. I knew there would be a table with his photograph on it.
I have told myself various things about why. That it was the only weekend I could get off. That it felt right.
It was not that.
I wanted them to be standing in a room with their son’s photograph on a table when they found out, and I wanted about twenty people to be there when it happened.
That is what I actually did.
My father came out onto that porch and took hold of my wrist in front of all of them and said:
Ten years. And you come back today, of all days.
And he was not wrong. He was the only person on that porch who was not wrong about anything.
It has been fourteen months.
We go about every six weeks. It is eight hours and Leo sleeps most of it.
My father and I are not fixed and I do not know if we will be. He has apologised once, properly, at a kitchen table, and then not been able to look at me for about a day afterwards.
My mother and Leo are a different matter entirely. She has him on the phone twice a week. She has taught him to make something with pastry that I cannot make.
There is a photograph of Rhys on my hallway wall now too. I did not have one for ten years.
Leo knows. All of it, at ten, told properly over about four conversations by me and a woman who does this for a living.
He has been fine and I have not, and that is the correct way round.
Here is the only thing I have.
Everybody wants this to be about a father who threw his pregnant daughter out and got what he deserved on his own porch.
He did that, and he has to live in it, and he knows exactly what he did.
But there is a difference between a secret you are keeping for somebody and a secret you have started to enjoy holding.
Mine changed sides somewhere around the April. I could not tell you the day.
I started out protecting a dying man who had asked me to.
And by the May I was a nineteen-year-old with a letter in a drawer, deciding when two people were allowed to know where their son was.
They took ten years off me. That is true and I will not be talked out of it.
I took two weeks off them, in a room with a shared bathroom, and those two weeks were the only two that were ever going to matter.
If you are holding something because somebody asked you to —
check, every so often, whether they are still the reason.
Because the day it stops being about them and starts being about what it does to somebody else, it is not a promise any more.
It is just a thing you have got that they want.
One last thing.
In the January, Leo asked me whether he could have the letter.
Not to read now. He said: when I’m older. He said it very carefully, the way he says things he has been working up to.
I rang my father. It is the only time I have ever rung him about anything.
I said: Leo wants the letter when he’s older.
And there was a long silence and then he said: it’s in the garage.
And I said: I know.
Nobody has moved it yet. It is still in a toolbox in Ohio and I am still eight hours away, and that is where it is going to stay for a few more years, and I find I am all right with that.
