“When I got out of pris0n, I ran to my father’s house, but my stepmother coldly told me, ‘Your father was 𝕓𝕦𝕣𝕚𝕖𝕕 a year ago.’ Sh0cked, I went to the cemetery to look for his grave. The gravedigger stopped me: ‘Don’t look for it. He’s not here. He asked me to give you this.’

I stepped off the bus just after sunrise, the cold air cutting through my thin jacket as if it wanted to remind me that freedom was not the same as comfort. Twelve hours earlier, the prison gates had closed behind me for the last time, and I had not allowed myself a single pause to celebrate. My thoughts had only one destination. My father’s house. The place that had kept me alive in my imagination during the years when concrete walls and metal doors defined my world.

The neighborhood looked smaller than I remembered, but the street still curved the same way, lined with old maples whose bare branches scraped the pale winter sky. When I reached the house, my chest tightened. The porch railing was familiar, though freshly painted. The front door was no longer the deep green my father favored. It was gray now. Strange vehicles crowded the driveway. None of them belonged to him.

I knocked anyway. The door opened just enough for a woman to look at me without inviting me in. Her hair was perfectly styled, her sweater pressed, her eyes sharp with irritation rather than surprise.

“You should not be here,” she said flatly.

I swallowed. “I just got out. I need to see my father.”