I was 23 when Mom left and left me with three baby sisters to raise. Twenty years later, my girls came to my birthday bringing a letter she had secretly sent them at the age of 18. I had been hiding it for two years. Then they told me why Mom had made sure I should never read it.
The first time one of my sisters called me Dad, he locked me in the bathroom and I cried.
Emma was barely two years old.
I had been sitting on the floor of the room surrounded by plastic blocks, three training cups and enough crushed cereal to feed a small country.
Grace was asleep against the couch.
Sophie had somehow removed a sock and had hidden it somewhere she wouldn’t find until three weeks later.
Emma climbed up my lap, put a wooden cow in my hand and said, “Daddy, muuu.”
I stopped breathing.
