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Dad talked about me when I wasn’t there.

He showed people pictures.

He remembered the clothes.

The drawings.

The things I wanted.

He was afraid to die because he was afraid to leave me.

And then, when he knew he was dying anyway, he gave the problem of me to someone else.

It hurts so much that for a moment I almost wish Adrien hadn’t told me.

Not because I don’t want to know, because I do.

God, I do.

I want every scrap of Dad he has. I want to know what Dad ate and what he complained about and how he laughed when I wasn’t around to hear it. I want all eleven years back in stories if that is the closest thing anyone can give me.

But this part—

This part is different.

Because Dad asked, Adrien promised, and I was still all alone.

Well, literally being “all alone” probably would’ve been better than living with Mom and her boyfriends all these years.

My fingers sink into my rabbit’s worn fur as Adrien watches me from the end of the bed.

He looks tired now.

Not physically, exactly. There’s something heavier about it than that, something sitting behind his eyes as if all the things he’s spent years refusing to look directly at have finally crowded into this room with us.

I stare at him.

At the man Dad trusted with me.

At the man who found me eleven years too late.

The man who kidnapped me from an alley.

A question rises slowly through the grief, then another, then so many that suddenly I can’t breathe around them.

“What do you mean, ‘it took until now?’”

Adrien goes very still.

I sniff and wipe beneath my nose with the back of my hand, too exhausted to care if it’s gross.

“You said it took until now,” I repeat.

“I did.”

“Why?”

“Kamden… Maybe it would be best to continue this later, so you can have a break to process—”