My mother, Evelyn, was the opposite. She was warm, talkative, and always ready to remind me that I was the greatest blessing of her life.
They had raised me in a modest house on the edge of a small town. We were not wealthy, but I had never felt deprived of anything that truly mattered.
Or at least, that was what I believed.
There had always been one strange thing about our family.
We had almost no photographs of me as a newborn.
Whenever I asked about it, Mom said the hospital photographer had lost the pictures. Dad would suddenly find something interesting to do in the garage.
When I was younger, I accepted their explanation.
As I grew older, I stopped asking.
Then, three weeks before my twenty-fourth birthday, everything began to change.
Dad started acting strangely.
He would sometimes stare at me across the breakfast table as if he wanted to say something but couldn’t find the courage. On several occasions, I caught him standing outside my bedroom door late at night.
