I had spent my whole life resenting a father who I believed had taken the easy way out, who had walked away from responsibility, who had chosen his own freedom over me.

The truth was the precise and total opposite.

He had chosen a prison cell over his freedom, and a false and shameful reputation over the truth, and twenty years of invisible poverty over any life at all, every single time, and every single time he had chosen it for me.”

Chapter 15 — Why He Didn’t Tell Me

I held the photograph against my heart and I asked the question that was tearing at me, the one that made no sense inside all this love.

“But why,” I said, “why didn’t he just tell me?