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A bitter laugh tore from my throat.

“Like Caspian Black would ever let his phone die on me.”

I looked around the silent room.

“Everybody had an opinion: the police, the streets, people who didn’t know a damn thing about us. Everybody had a theory about where you went or what you did.”

My voice rose, raw with years of rage.

“But nobody knew anything! Or nobody had the guts to tell me!”

I pressed my hands against my eyes, bending forward until my forehead nearly touched my knees.

“Did somebody hurt you?” The question slipped out as a ragged whisper. “Did somebody take you away from me? Or did you... did you really just walk away?”

My face crumpled.

That was the poisonous thought I'd fought against every single day. I knew his heart. I knew how deeply he'd loved me.

He wouldn’t have left me willingly.

He wouldn’t have.

“What happened to you, Caspian?” I sobbed, rocking slightly. “Why didn’t you come home? You promised me you would.”

My vision blurred with fresh tears.

“I would’ve waited,” I cried out. “Whatever trouble you were in, whatever mess you thought you had to clean up... I would’ve stood right beside you. I would’ve waited forever.”

I lifted my head, staring at the ceiling as grief tore through my ribs.

“I didn’t even get to say goodbye. I didn’t get to marry you. We didn’t get to live any of the life you planned for us.”

A ragged sob tore from my throat, and I covered my mouth with both hands to stifle the sound before it could carry down the hall.

“You don’t even know you have a son,” I wept into my fingers. “You don’t know how much he looks like you. He has your exact eyes, Caspian. He gets that same stubborn frown whenever somebody tells him no. He walks like you. He talks with his hands like you.”

A wet, heartbroken laugh broke through my tears.

“You would’ve loved him so much. You would’ve spoiled him rotten and bought him every ridiculous thing in this city.”

I wiped my face with my sleeve, my voice dropping to a painful whisper.

“He asks about you all the time. He points at this house and tells people it’s his daddy’s house. And I don’t have a single answer to give him. That’s what kills me, Caspian. I can’t even tell him the truth because I don’t know the damn truth. It’s not fair… none of this is fair.”

I dropped my hands into my lap, and for some reason, that part hurt in a way that reached much further back than Caspian.

Maybe because I knew what it felt like to be a little kid with questions about a father nobody seemed willing or able to answer.

Willow and I had different daddies. Hers lived out of town, but she knew him. She talked to him regularly, visited him, and always knew exactly who he was… I never had that. As far back as I could remember, whenever I asked my mom about mine, she gave me the same answer: “He’s away working.”

When I was little, that was enough. I believed her because she was my mom, and children believed the adults they trusted. In my head, my daddy was somewhere far away working some important job that kept him gone for long stretches of time. I used to think eventually that job would end and he would come home.

He never did.

By the time I was old enough to realize how little sense that explanation made, my mom was already gone. I had only been ten when she died, and at ten, I didn’t know enough about life to ask the questions I would’ve known to ask as a grown woman. I never asked for his full name, never asked where he lived, what kind of work supposedly kept him away for my entire childhood, how they met, or whether the man even knew I existed.

For a long time, that was the one thing I couldn’t forgive my mom for… not because I expected some beautiful story about a father who had desperately wanted me. I just wanted the truth. Maybe she knew exactly who he was and had her reasons for keeping him from me. Maybe he knew about me and wanted nothing to do with having a child… or maybe my mom wasn’t completely sure who my father was and had been too ashamed to admit that, so telling a little girl her daddy was away working had been easier.