"He knew before the crash."
I read the words on the back of the photograph three times. My mother's handwriting. Careful and slanted. The same style as the letter from the chapel. The same hand that wrote my name on the front of that brown envelope.
She wrote this. Which means she knew something was coming. Which means she tried to leave a record before she ran out of time.
And the man she pointed to was Victor.
My grandfather.
The man is currently sitting in a locked car two miles away with a weak heart and twenty years of guilt on his face. The man who spent those twenty years telling me he searched for me every single day. The man who held my cold hand in a hospital room and told me nobody would make me feel small again.
I set the photograph down on Elena's desk very carefully. Li
