Not his face.

Not his history.

Not even his name.

My mother, whenever I asked, would go still and careful in a way I did not understand as a child, and would tell me only that it was complicated, that he was gone, that she loved me enough that I did not need to worry about it.

And so I had built, over the years, the story that every child in my situation builds: that my father had left because he did not want me, that somewhere out in the world there was a man who had looked at the fact of my coming existence and decided to walk away from it, and that his absence was, in some final unspoken way, a judgment on my worth.

I had carried that story into adulthood like a stone in my chest.