I never knew my father.
He left when I was three—or so I thought. That’s what Mom always told me. “He walked out,” she’d say with a clenched jaw and averted gaze. Whenever I dared ask more, the room would go cold.
So I stopped asking.
Growing up, I filled the gaps with silence. At school, I told friends he was “gone.” At home, I acted like I didn’t care. But when I once found a birthday card buried in the trash—addressed to me in careful, looping handwriting—I stared at it for a long time before quietly setting it on fire in the sink.
Years passed. I turned twenty-four and started my own life, carrying his absence like a shadow I’d trained myself not to look at.
Then came the phone call.
My father had died. A heart attack. Alone in a small town I’d never heard of.
I nearly ignored the funeral invitation. What was the point? But something inside me—a pull I couldn’t explain—urged me to go. I told myself it was for closure.
The funeral was modest, with a handful of strangers and one woman standing near the casket. Her name was Lillian. My father’s wife. The “other woman” my mother always loathed.
After the service, she approached me hesitantly, her eyes puffy and tired.
“I know you don’t know me,” she said. “But I need to show you something.”
She pressed a small brass key into my hand. “It’s to his storage unit. He said… if you ever showed up, I should give this to you.”
I didn’t understand. Why me?
Later that afternoon, I found myself sitting across from a lawyer, the will resting in front of us.
He cleared his throat. “To my daughter, Emma Rose—whom I never stopped loving—I leave my journals, my artwork, and the cabin I built with my own hands, waiting for her in Whispering Pines.”
My ears rang. What?
The lawyer looked up gently. “He wrote to you every birthday. Every Christmas. Every milestone.”
I blinked. “But I never got—”
“Your mother intercepted them all,” Lillian said softly. “He never stopped trying. Never.”
That evening, I went to the storage unit.
Inside were twenty-one journals, each labeled with my name and a year. Drawings of me as a toddler. Letters. Paintings. A photo of him holding me, eyes full of light.
He hadn’t left me.
He had been stolen from me.
And in that dusty room of forgotten things, I wept for the man I never knew—yet who had never let go.
And for the first time, I let myself believe that maybe, just maybe, I had been loved all along.