“You have five minutes.”
He nodded. “Okay.”
“Why did you leave?”
His eyes dropped. “I panicked. I couldn’t sit there watching her get worse while everyone told us to accept it.”
The money would be the easiest part to understand.
“So you abandoned us?”
“No. I started looking for something they’d missed.”
“You could’ve used a phone.”
“I did. Hundreds of times. You blocked me. And whenever I called from another number, you blocked that one too.”
I couldn’t sit there watching her get worse.
“So where were you?”
“Wherever I could find work. Arizona. Nevada. Germany for a while.”
“And all that time?”
“I kept looking.”
He reached down and pulled a battered folder from his bag.
“What’s that?”
You blocked me.
Instead of answering, he slid it across the table.
I opened it.
Boston. Toronto. Zurich. Berlin.
Emails.
Applications.
Rejections.
Names of doctors I recognized and others I didn’t.
The oldest was dated less than six months after he left us.
I kept looking.
“You kept all of this?”
“I kept hoping one of them would stop saying no.”
I closed the folder. “None of this explains why you stopped being her father.”
