My father did not speak for a long time. He sat there with the photograph trembling between his fingers, the edges bending under the pressure of his grip. My mother stood beside the doorway, one hand pressed to her chest, breathing as though the room had suddenly run out of air.
Leo looked from one adult to another.
“Mom?” he asked quietly. “Who’s Ethan?”
I turned to him, and for a second, the entire world softened.
How could I explain that the man whose name had haunted me for ten years was not just a ghost from my past? How could I tell my son that his father had been brave, brilliant, stubborn, and doomed?
