Tucked behind my driver’s license was the very first rent receipt Dad had given me on my eighteenth birthday.

Two hundred and fifty dollars.

Paid in full.

I’d kept it for five years because I’d wanted proof of how much he’d taken from me.

Now I looked at it differently.

Not because the money had been returned.

Not because everything he’d done was suddenly acceptable.

But because I finally understood that there had been more to our story than either of us had known how to say.