“Tell me yourself.”
Frank closed his eyes.
“Some truths need another voice.”
Those became the last words he ever spoke to me.
A nurse entered when the monitor started chirping.
She checked his pulse before adjusting the oxygen.
“He is still with us,” she said. “But he may not wake again.
I stepped into the hallway and unfolded the paper.
Frank’s shaky handwriting filled the center with a single address.
It was less than twenty minutes from the house where he had raised me.
For a moment, I considered throwing it away.
Whatever existed at that address could not possibly matter more than the man dying in the room behind me.
Then I remembered the look in his eyes.
It had not been fear of dying.
It had been fear that I would never understand him.
I drove through nearly deserted streets with both hands locked around the steering wheel.
By the time I arrived, I had imagined almost every kind of betrayal.
