If the walls, the routine, and the fluorescent lights press even your penmanship into a tighter space.
The first paragraph is an apology.
Broad, practiced, built from the language of a man who's sat in group sessions and listened to counselors talk about accountability.
He's sorry for the pain he's caused. He's sorry for the years of silence, the distance, the choices that led to their separation.
Their separation. Like it was mutual. Like it was a thing they both did, a falling apart, a drifting.
Not a stabbing. Not a parking lot. Not thirty-two times.
He doesn't use those words. He doesn't use any words that would force him to see what he did in the resolution it deserves.
He calls it "that night." He calls it "what happened." He calls it "the worst mistake of my life."
A mistake is when you grab the wrong coffee order.
When you miss an exit on the highway.
You don't pick up a knife and drive it into a woman thirty-two times and call it a fuckingmistake.
The second paragraph is about his program.
Therapy, group work, a mentor named Dale who's been helping him process his anger.
He's reading books. He's writing in a journal. He's finding clarity.
Clarity.
I read the word and feel my jaw lock.
The third paragraph is where it turns. Where it always turns, because men like my father can sustain the performance of remorse for exactly as long as it takes to reach the part they care about most.
I need you to know I was a good father to you, Sailor. Whatever else happened, whatever I did, I loved you and your mother more than anything in this world. I still do. That hasn't changed. I'm asking for a chance to show you I've changed, even if it's a letter back. Even if it's one word. I need to know my daughter is okay.
I set the letter on the counter and stare at it.
He loved us more than anything in this world.
He loved us so much he put his hands on his girlfriend when she tried to leave him.
He loved us so much his anger issues drove my mother to file for divorce when I was eleven.
He loved us so much that a woman named Christine Pelletier is buried in East Oak Grove Cemetery because she told him she was done, and he decided she wasn't allowed to be.
Christine was thirty-four.
She taught second grade at Suncrest Elementary.
She had a daughter named Amina who was five years old and is now nineteen or twenty and living somewhere in this same town, carrying her own version of what my father did.
I know her name. I've always known it.
I looked her up once, on a night when the guilt was bad enough to make me stupid.
Found her Instagram. Scrolled through photos of a girl my age with her mother's smile and her mother's coloring and no posts older than fourteen years because everything before that belongs to a world where her mother existed.
I closed the app and didn't open it again.