His voice broke. “I never got him back. The system took him. Said I was unfit. By the time I got out, he’d been adopted. Closed adoption. I’ve never seen him again.”
Thomas wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’ve spent the last thirty years trying to make up for it. Volunteering. Helping people. Trying to be the man I should have been back then. And when your wife grabbed my hand and begged me to save her daughter from the same fate as her husband—”
Every week for three years, Thomas brought Destiny to see me.
Every single week. Summer, winter, didn’t matter. Rain, snow, didn’t matter. He drove two hours each way with a baby in the back seat just so I could see my daughter through a glass wall.
In the beginning, she was so small. Thomas would hold her up to the glass and I’d press my hand against it, trying to feel her warmth through the barrier.
I watched her grow through that glass. Watched her learn to hold her head up. Watched her first smile. Watched her reach for me even though she couldn’t touch me.
“Da-da,” she said one day when she was about fourteen months old. Thomas had taught her that. Had shown her my picture every night and said “Daddy loves you.”
I cried so hard the guards almost ended the visit early.
Thomas sent me letters every week too. Updates on everything. Her first steps. Her first words. The foods she liked. The songs that made her laugh. He sent photos. Hundreds of photos. I wallpapered my cell with them.
The other inmates didn’t understand at first. “Who’s the old white dude raising your kid?” they asked. Some made jokes. Some thought it was weird.
After a while, even the hardest guys in the block respected it. “That’s loyalty,” one lifer told me. “That’s a real man. Most people don’t show up like that.”
My prison counselor was amazed. “In fifteen years, I’ve never seen anything like this. This man has no obligation to you. No connection to you. He’s raising your daughter and driving four hours every week just so you can see her.”
“He made a promise,” I said. “ToContinue reading…
