I did not understand, then, the true weight of what I had just given him.

I thought I was offering a kind fiction to a man at the end of his life, a sweet harmless game to soothe his final weeks.

I did not know that I had just spoken, to my own actual father, the one word he had crossed twenty years of darkness and silence and sacrifice to hear.

I only saw him laugh, and felt his hand tighten around mine, and thought, with a warmth I had not felt in a very long time, that I had done a good thing.

I had.