My voice cracked, but I didn’t care.
“Not because you owe me anything. You don’t. But I have loved you as my daughter for sixteen years. I don’t know how not to be scared.”
Adelina looked at me for two seconds.
Then she stood, walked around the table, and wrapped her arms around me so tightly my chair shifted.
“Dad,” she said.
Just that one word.
Dad.
When she pulled away, she turned to the woman.
There was a long pause.
Then she gave her a brief, careful hug.
Not forgiveness.
Not reunion.
Just acknowledgment.
Since then, everything has been complicated in the most human way possible.
Some moments, Adelina wants to know everything—about her father, her early years, her first words.
Other times, she just wants to sit and watch garbage TV and pretend none of it exists.
David has remained exactly himself.
Yesterday he told her:
“For the record, nobody is replacing anybody, and if this woman hurts you, I’m stealing her tires.”
Adelina laughed so hard she snorted.
Her biological mother hasn’t pushed.
She brought photographs.
