“Before you were born. Before I ruined everything.”
“What did you do?”
He took a slow breath.
“I made choices that hurt the woman I loved. Choices that cost me my freedom. Choices that meant I wasn’t there when my daughter grew up.”
My hands began to shake.
Daughter.
The word hung between us.
I looked at the bluebird on his wrist, the envelope in his hand, and the pale blue eyes that had been watching me since he entered the salon.
I had seen those eyes in old photographs of myself as a baby.
I had never understood why they looked so familiar.
“Tell me the truth,” I whispered.
Ray’s face crumpled.
“I don’t expect you to forgive me. I don’t expect you to call me anything. I just couldn’t let another year pass without seeing you.”
He paused, struggling to continue.
“I’ve been sober for nine years, Lucy. I’ve worked hard to become someone who can stand in front of you without lying about who I am.”
“Why now?”
“Because I don’t have much time left to keep making excuses.”
My eyes burned.
I wanted to shout at him.
I wanted to demand to know why he hadn’t been there when I needed a father, why my mother had carried her secrets alone, and why he had waited until I was grown to appear in my life.
But beneath all those questions was another one.
The question I had carried since childhood.
The question I had never received an answer to.
I looked at the man sitting in my chair.
“Are you my father?”
Ray closed his eyes.
A single tear rolled down his cheek.
“Yes,” he whispered. “I’m your father.”
For several seconds, neither of us moved.
Then Brenda quietly walked to the front door, locked it, and turned the sign to CLOSED.
She looked at me.
“Lucy, take all the time you need.”
Ray stared at his hands.
“I know I don’t deserve anything from you,” he said. “But if you’ll let me, I’d like to tell you what happened.”
I glanced at the envelope.
My mother’s handwriting seemed to blur through my tears.
I had spent years wondering who my father was.
Now he was sitting less than three feet away from me.
And the truth was finally within reach.
But before Ray could begin his story, he reached into his pocket once more and placed something on my station.
It was a small, faded photograph.
A photograph of my mother holding a newborn baby.
Beside her stood a young man with pale blue eyes and a bluebird tattoo on his wrist.
On the back, my mother had written four words that made my heart stop.
“All three of us.”
I turned the photograph over again, my fingers trembling.
Then I looked at Ray.
“Tell me everything.”
And he began.