“What are you talking about?”
“I need you to discover the truth before I die.”
He swallowed.
“Even though I was begged to take it to my grave.”
Suddenly, a thousand questions crowded my mind.
Was my biological father alive?
Had Frank hidden letters from me?
Had there been another family?
Another marriage?
Another version of the man I thought I knew?
Frank reached beneath the blanket with trembling fingers and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
He placed it in my palm.
“Go there.”
I looked at the address.
“Now.”
“I can’t leave you.”
“You have to.”
Tears slid into the gray stubble along his jaw.
“Please, Rosalie.”
He hadn’t called me Rosalie like that since I was a child.
I bent closer.
“Tell me yourself.”
His eyes closed.
“Some truths need another voice.”
Those were the last words he ever said to me.
A few minutes later, the monitor began chirping.
A nurse hurried into the room.
She checked his pulse and adjusted his oxygen.
“He is still with us,” she said softly.
“But he may not wake again.”
I stood in the hallway and unfolded the paper.
An address was written in Frank’s shaky handwriting.
The house was less than 20 minutes from the home where he had raised me.
I stared at it.
For a moment, I almost threw it away.
Whatever was waiting at that address couldn’t possibly matter more than the man dying behind me.
Then I remembered the look in Frank’s eyes.
It wasn’t fear of death.
It was fear that I would never understand him.
So I went.
The streets were nearly empty as I drove.
I gripped the steering wheel so tightly my fingers began to ache.
During the drive, my mind created one betrayal after another.
A secret wife.
A secret child.
A person who would tell me Frank had never wanted me.
Someone who knew a version of him I had never seen.
By the time I reached the address, I was almost afraid to knock.
An elderly woman opened the door.
She had silver hair, pale blue eyes, and one hand pressed against her mouth.
She stared at me as though she’d been waiting for a ghost.
“Rosalie,” she whispered.
I took a step back.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Caroline.”
“How do you know me?”
She looked toward the dark street behind me.
