I handed him the letter without a word and watched his face as he read it. He went through every expression I’d gone through: confusion, then dawning understanding, then the kind of stillness that comes when something too large to immediately process lands.
“I found something.”
“Billy,” he said finally. “Your Uncle Billy.”
“He’s not my uncle,” I corrected. “He’s my father. And he has no idea.”
Tyler pulled me in and let me cry for a while without trying to fix it. Then he leaned back and looked at me.
“Do you want to see him?”
I thought about every memory of Billy I had: his easy laugh, and the way he’d told me once that I had beautiful eyes that reminded him of someone, without knowing what he was really saying. I recalled the way Grandma’s hands would go still whenever he was in the room.
“He’s my father. And he has no idea.”
It had never been discomfort. It had been the weight of knowing something she couldn’t say.
“Yes,” I told Tyler. “I need to see him.”
***
We drove there the following afternoon.