My father had always provided me with everything, but he had never been affectionate. He didn’t hug me. He didn’t tell me
he loved me. He almost never spoke about my mother either. All I knew was that she had died a few months after I was born.
Whenever I asked who I looked like as a child, my father would say:
“You have your mother’s eyes.”
Then he would fall silent and walk away. But that evening, he seemed like a completely different man. He had reserved a
private table at an expensive restaurant and wore the black suit he had kept in his closet for years. In the center of the table
sat a thick brown envelope with my full name written across it.
“What’s inside?” I asked.
“You’ll open it after dinner.”
“Why not now?”
“Because if you open it now, you may not want to stay until the end.”
His answer made my blood run cold.
I started thinking that he might be seriously ill and that the envelope contained his will. Then I noticed that his friends kept
avoiding eye contact with me. We ordered our food, but I couldn’t swallow a single bite.
The men spoke about their younger years. Occasionally, they mentioned a woman named Laura, but whenever her name
came up, my father tensed. Laura was my mother’s name.
“You really do look like her,” Robert finally said.
“Did you know my mother well?”
