My stepmother raised me after my father passed away when I was six years old. Years later, I discovered the letter he wrote the night before he djed.
Part 1 — The Story I Was Raised On
My birth mother died bringing me into the world. That was the first truth I was ever handed, and for years, it was the only one. In the beginning, it was just my father and me, tucked inside a cramped apartment in San Antonio, where I would sit on the kitchen counter and listen to him tell me I was his whole world.
When I was four, he met a woman named Victoria. Six months later, they were married, and not long after that, she adopted me legally. I started calling her Mom, and little by little, our life began to look like something steady. Something safe.
Then, two years later, she came into my room one afternoon looking like the air had been punched out of her. She dropped to her knees in front of me, took my hands, and said the words that split my childhood in half.
