I had to leave before the award ceremony, because the investigators were following my credit cards and I could not risk them noticing the rental car.

I remembered that spelling bee.

I remembered the yellow dress.

I had not known that somewhere in that dark auditorium, my father had been sitting in the back row, watching, and had slipped out before the end so that his love would not endanger me.

I do not think I can fully convey what it did to me to read that entry, to learn that a memory I had always filed under the ordinary triumphs of childhood, my little spelling bee, my yellow dress, had also been, unknown to me, one of the rare and dangerous stolen glimpses of a father who loved me.

I had been there.