I sat with those words for a long time, unable to speak.

Ten years.

My father had spent ten years of his life in a prison cell, labeled a criminal, stripped of his name and his freedom and his good reputation, for crimes he had not committed, and he had done it on purpose.

He had looked at the choice in front of him, fight the frame and possibly clear his name but keep the danger circling his family, or accept the frame and take all the danger into his own body, and he had chosen the cell.

He had chosen to let the world believe he was a thief and a fraud, to let his own daughter grow up believing he was a deadbeat who had run, rather than risk the men who wanted him dead turning their eyes toward a woman and a child in hiding.