Because I experienced them innocently.

I gave Julian my company and my care freely, with no sense of obligation, no weight of history, no complicated feelings about a father who had wronged me, precisely because I did not know he was my father.

I got to love him cleanly, the way you can only love someone before the complications arrive, and he got to receive that clean, uncomplicated love, which was the one thing twenty years of planning could never have manufactured and the only thing he truly wanted.

Had I known who he was, our six weeks would have been something else, heavier, more fraught, full of necessary difficult conversations.