I looked at the flash drive on the table, the thing I had carried and guarded for ten years, and I made a decision.

“There’s more,” I said quietly.

“There’s more, and you need to see it.

All of it.” I said it carefully, because I could feel how much was balanced on that moment.

For ten years I had built my understanding of my father on a single certain fact, that he had chosen his pride over me.

That certainty had cost me a great deal, but it had also, in a strange way, protected me; it is easier to be exiled by a villain than by a frightened man who loved you.

If I was wrong about him, if the story I had told myself for a decade was not the true story, then everything I had felt about that night, all the clean hot anger that had helped me survive, would have to be rebuilt from the ground up into something far more complicated and far more painful.