“I drove two hundred miles,” he rasped. “I just wanted to see you graduate. Just once.”
My body turned instinctively, my heart hammering so hard I thought it might burst. I couldn’t look at him—at the frayed patch on his vest, the grease under his nails, the desperate hope in his eyes that I’d refused to see for years. My crimson gown brushed against my legs as I walked away—from him, from everything I’d buried since I was fourteen, the moment I decided I was better than him.
It was simpler that way—easier than admitting he was alive somewhere out there, riding with a motorcycle club in some forgotten corner of Kansas. Easier than confessing my tuition didn’t come from a trust fund, but from a made-up “family scholarship” I’d crafted to make my story sound clean.
“What did your father do?” my roommate once asked, glancing at the blank wall where no picture of him hung.
“He wasn’t anyone important,” I said evenly. “He died when I was young.”
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