One spring morning, almost a year after the airport incident, a letter arrived addressed in my father’s handwriting. Grandma opened it at the kitchen table while I sat across from her, my own coffee going lukewarm as I waited.
He wrote that he had sold his expensive car, the one he’d been so proud of two years earlier. He had moved into a smaller apartment. He had repaid a portion of the money already, working with an accountant to slowly repair the financial damage he’d caused, both to Grandma and, it turned out, to the company itself, which had apparently been carrying more debt than any of us had known while he’d been quietly siphoning funds elsewhere.
He didn’t ask for money. He didn’t ask for forgiveness. He only wrote, near the end of the letter, I’m trying to become someone you can trust again.
