I was still reeling, my hands trembling so violently that the Polaroid nearly slipped from my fingers. My father. Alive? It was an impossibility that defied every logic I had clung to for years. I couldn't explain how a dead man could be breathing, let alone standing in front of a landmark in London with yesterday’s date in his hand. I remembered the talks about his funeral. I remembered the hollow, gut-wrenching grief and the way Mom would take us to his hometown occasionally to visit his grave, laying flowers on a cold stone that I now realized might have been marking an empty hole.
It had to be fake. It had to be a deepfake, or some sick AI-generated trick meant to torture me. There was no way he was alive. He had left us in drowning debt—a mountain of financial ruin that Mom had to br
