Chapter 3 - What Walter Said
Nathan opened the envelope slowly. Inside was a faded photograph — a young man laughing, his head turned slightly away from the camera. Behind his ear, faint but unmistakable, sat a small triangular mark in exactly the spot where Hazel's was.
Underneath the photo, someone had written an address in careful blue ink.
Three weeks later, our kitchen table was buried under old photographs, loose papers, Hazel's baby monitor, and the contents of a shoebox Vivian had hauled down from her attic. Nathan still wrestled with the idea of actually going looking.
"I feel like I'm betraying Dad by doing this."
"You're not replacing him," I told him, not for the first time. "You're just filling in a blank space. Those aren't the same thing."
Eventually, he picked up the phone and called Walter. I couldn't hear what his father said on the other end, but I watched the tension slowly drain out of Nathan's shoulders as the call went on.
"Are you sure, Dad?"
A long pause.
Then Nathan closed his eyes.
When the call ended, he looked at me, and for the first time in weeks his whole face had relaxed. "He said being my father has been the honor of his life. He said learning where I came from doesn't change one single thing about that."
Months later, the address on the back of that photograph led us to a house three states away. A woman named Dorothy answered the door. The moment she saw Nathan's face, she went completely still, staring at him like she'd seen a ghost.
May you like
Then she said quietly, "Oh. You must be his."
Miles, we learned, had passed away years earlier. There would be no dramatic reunion, no tearful embrace between father and son. Instead, Dorothy gave Nathan something quieter, and in its own way just as meaningful — stories. Old photographs. Small pieces of a man he had never had the chance to know.
