“I’m your father,” he said quietly, before I could form the question. The words landed like something I’d been bracing for my whole life without knowing it. I had grown up believing my father left before I was born, that he wanted nothing to do with us, that he had simply vanished. My mother had told me that story until the day she passed, four years ago. Roy shook his head slowly as he watched my face. “That’s not what happened,” he said. “But I understand why she told it that way. I gave her every reason to.”

He explained it standing there on the sidewalk, the other parents long gone, Malachi leaning against my leg. Roy had been young and reckless when I was born, in trouble more often than not, and my mother had made the hard choice to keep me away from that life.

He had tried to come back years later, cleaned up, steady, but by then she had moved and left no way to reach her. He had spent two decades searching. When he’d started volunteering at the reading program, he’d had no idea the shy boy at his table was his own grandson, not until Malachi mentioned his mother’s name, my name, the same one Roy had been carrying in his memory for thirty years. He had recognized it instantly. He’d started coming back every Friday just to be near the grandchild he’d only just discovered, terrified of exactly this moment.