Whatever it was, it moved my heart before my mind had any facts to work with, and it moved it in exactly the right direction.

Chapter 5 — The Words That Cut Deep

To understand why Julian’s request undid me instead of unsettling me, you have to understand the particular emptiness I had carried since before I could remember, the emptiness shaped exactly like a father.

My mother had raised me alone.

It had always been just the two of us, Claire and Evelyn, a small fierce team of two against the world, and she had loved me enough for two parents and never once let me feel poor for the lack of the second.

But the lack was there all the same, a quiet absence at the center of my life, because my father had left before I was born, and I had grown up knowing nothing about him.