"I didn't know my own name for years."
My daughters are crying now too, the youngest reaching tentatively for my hand.
"Dad?" she asks. "You're really our dad?"
I pull her into my arms. Then the others. Then Laura.
Five sets of arms. Twenty years collapsing into one breath.
"I never stopped hoping," I tell her. "Even when I told myself I had."
"I know," she whispers. "Somehow I always knew you were still waiting."
"You're really our dad?"
I don't sell the house out of grief anymore.
I sell it because we need a bigger one, one with rooms full of laughter instead of silence.
Diane visits sometimes. Laura forgave her before I could.
"Holding on to anger," Laura tells me one evening, "is just another way of staying lost."
I look at our family around the dinner table, six faces I thought I'd never see together again.
Hope, I learn, doesn't shout. It waits, patient and quiet, until you're brave enough to answer the door.
"Holding on to anger is just another way of staying lost."
