“I thought he was there to hit me. I would’ve let him.”
He paused to collect himself.
“Instead, he shook my hand. He told me he’d figured everything out years earlier. He said he never told Kayla because she was his daughter, no matter whose blood she carried.”
Mom covered her face.
Ray continued.
“Frank told me a girl could never have too many people in her corner. Then he handed me a letter he’d written for her twenty-first birthday.”
Dad had known.
For more than twenty years, he’d known there was another man who had fathered his daughter.
And he’d chosen to love her without making her carry the burden of his knowledge.
When his own health began to fail, he made sure she’d have a way to find Ray after he was gone.
Kayla opened the letter on her twenty-first birthday.
Two weeks later, she found Ray.
For three years, they met at the same diner every other Tuesday. They talked over coffee, shared slices of pie, and slowly built a relationship that had been denied to them for most of her life.
