Dad left when I was three. Twenty-eight years later he stood on my step thinner than the man in the one photograph I kept, and said he was dying and had nowhere else to go. I let him in. I paid the clinic bills, the prescriptions, the extra groceries. I told myself I was doing it for the child I had been, not for the man who vanished. He slept in the spare room and thanked me in a voice that always sounded half packed to leave again.

One night I heard him on the phone, speaking low. She will not check until I am gone. I stood in the hall until the call ended. The next morning I found an envelope in the lining of his coat. My hands shook before I finished the first page. It was not a scheme against me. It was a letter to a lawyer and a copy of a life policy taken out two months after he arrived. I was the only beneficiary. Behind that were smaller pages: money orders sent to my mother for years under a name I did not know, and a note in his uneven writing.