had planned all of it with him over the final year of his life.
Dad had known he was dying. And in that last year, he’d done something extraordinary for a man who’d spent his whole life unable to say what he felt: he’d built a way to say it after he was gone. He couldn’t manage the words face to face — that rigidity went too deep, sixty years of it. But he could plan. He could prepare. He could leave a message so carefully constructed that it would reach his son at the exact moment his son was ready to receive it.
So he’d had the red suit made. A real one, tailored, bright as the shirts Eric had wanted as a boy and never been allowed. He’d hidden it in a closet he knew Eric would eventually find, because Eric was the one who cared about Dad’s military
