I was three years old when my father left—or at least, that’s what my mother always told me. She never wanted to talk about him, and whenever I asked, she’d say, “He didn’t want to be a father.” I carried that pain with me for decades, until the day I got a call from a stranger inviting me to his funeral.
I went, not knowing what to expect. After the service, a woman named Laura handed me a small silver key and said my father had left me something. What I found in his will shocked me: legal documents showing he had fought for years to see me, but my mother had blocked him at every turn. The man I thought had abandoned me had actually never given up on me.
