But the man in front of me did not match the story.

This was not a man protecting his pride.

This was a man drowning in something, some fear or guilt or grief so large it had bent the whole shape of his life around it.

And I began, for the first time, to wonder whether I had understood any of it correctly.

Whether my father’s fury that long-ago night had come from where I always assumed it had.

Whether the coldness, the ultimatum, the slammed door, had been about my pregnancy at all, or about something else entirely, something he had never been able to say.