I was twenty when I discovered my stepmother hadn’t told me the full truth about my father’s death. For fourteen years, she insisted it had been a simple car accident—unavoidable, tragic, nothing more. Then I found a letter he had written the night before he died. One sentence in it made my pulse stop.For the first four years of my life, it was just Dad and me.My memories from that time are blurry—soft flashes of his scratchy cheek when he carried me to bed, the way he’d lift me onto the kitchen counter.“Supervisors belong up high,” he’d joke. “You’re my whole world, kiddo.”My biological mother died when I was born. I once asked about her while he was making breakfast.“Did Mommy like pancakes?” I said.He paused for a beat.

“She loved them. But not as much as she would have loved you.”His voice sounded thick, almost strained. I didn’t understand why back then.Everything shifted when I turned four.That’s when Meredith entered our lives. The first time she came over, she crouched to my level.“So you’re the boss around here?” she smiled.I hid behind Dad’s leg.But she never pushed. She waited. Slowly, I warmed up to her.The next visit, I tested her. I had spent hours drawing a picture.“For you,” I said, holding it out carefully. “It’s important.”She accepted it like it was priceless. “I’ll keep it safe. I promise.”Six months later, they were married.Soon after, she adopted me. I started calling her Mom. For a while, life felt steady again.Then it broke.Two years later, I was in my room when Meredith came in. She looked different—like the air had been knocked out of her. She knelt in front of me, her hands icy as she held mine.