I wanted to run to them.

I wanted to fall on the marble and wrap my arms around them and beg.

I wanted, more than I had ever wanted anything, to hear the word Dad.

But I had sold that right for a seat in a boardroom.

I had not known, until that hallway, that the love was even there.

This is the thing that is hardest to explain and most important to say: I had told myself for thirteen years that I felt nothing for those children, and I had believed it, because believing it was the only way to live with what I had done.

A man cannot function while carrying the full weight of having abandoned his own sons; so I had not carried it, I had set it down, I had convinced myself the load did not exist.