I had spent ninety days filing the paperwork, pulling strings through corporate lawyers, and paying off the remaining back-taxes on a small, sunlit property back in Georgia—not far from Savannah, but miles away from the damp, mosquito-ridden riverbanks of our past. I wanted it to be a complete surprise. I wanted to hand him the keys, the deed, and the adoption papers all at once on his upcoming sixty-fifth birthday.
But life, as it always did with Mr. Raymond, had moved faster than my grand plans. His illness couldn’t wait for a birthday.
Through the tinted glass of my steering wheel, I watched the shoulders of the man who had built my entire universe rise and fall with heavy, ragged sobs. He was sitting on the cracked concrete steps of St. Jude’s Chapel, his worn-out baseball cap clutched so tightly in his hands that his knuckles turned white.
My heart felt like it was being crushed by a hydraulic press. Why did I say it like that? I asked myself, the guilt washing over me in suffocating waves. Why did I have to play that cruel, arrogant game?
