“If you’d given me the letter, I’d have found my father sooner.

But you still would have needed to answer the phone that night.”

His expression tightened as the truth reached him.

He had spent months treating the hidden letters as the central mistake because a letter could be returned, an apology issued, a document replaced.

His decision to dismiss my emergency was harder to explain away.

“You’re right,” he said at last.

He walked toward the parking lot.