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He washed my hair in the kitchen sink, one hand under my neck, the other pouring water. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “I got you.”
When I cried because I’d never dance or stand in a crowd, he sat on my bed, jaw tight. “You’re not less,” he said. “You hear me? You’re not less.”
By my teens, it was clear there’d be no miracle. Most of my life happened in my room. Ray made that room a world—shelves at my reach, a janky tablet stand he welded in the garage. For my twenty-first birthday, he built a planter box by the window and filled it with herbs. “So you can grow that basil you yell at on the cooking shows,” he said.
I burst into tears.
“Jesus, Hannah,” he panicked. “You hate basil?”
“It’s perfect,” I sobbed.
He looked away. “Yeah, well. Try not to kill it.”
Then he started slowing down. Sitting halfway up the stairs to catch his breath. Forgetting his keys. Burning dinner twice in a week.
Mrs. Patel, our neighbor, cornered him in the driveway. “You see a doctor,” she ordered. “Don’t be stupid.”
Between her nagging and my begging, he went.
After the tests, he sat at the kitchen table, papers under his hand. “Stage four,” he said. “It’s everywhere.”
“How long?” I whispered.
He shrugged. “They said numbers. I stopped listening.”
Hospice came. A nurse named Jamie set up a bed in the living room. Machines hummed. Medication charts went on the fridge.
The night before he died, he told everyone to leave. “Even me?” Jamie asked.
“Yeah,” he said. “Even you.”
He shuffled into my room and eased into the chair by my bed. “Hey, kiddo,” he said.
“Hey,” I said, already crying.
“You know you’re the best thing that ever happened to me, right?”
“That’s kind of sad,” I joked weakly.
“Still true.”
“I don’t know what to do without you,” I whispered.
His eyes went shiny. “You’re gonna live,” he said. “You hear me? You’re gonna live.”
“I’m scared.”
“I know,” he said. “Me too.”
He kissed my forehead. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.
“For what?”
“For things I should’ve told you. Get some sleep, Hannah.”
He died the next morning.
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The funeral was black clothes, bad coffee, and people saying, “He was a good man,” like that covered everything.
Back at the house, Mrs. Patel knocked and came in. She sat on my bed, eyes red, and held out an envelope. “Your uncle asked me to give you this,” she said. “And to tell you he’s sorry. And that… I am too.”
“Sorry for what?” I asked.
She shook her head. “You read it, beta. Then call me.”
My name was on the envelope in his blunt handwriting. My hands shook as I opened it. Several pages slid into my lap.
The first line said: “Hannah, I’ve been lying to you your whole life. I can’t take this with me.”
He wrote about the night of the crash—not the version I knew.
He said my parents had brought my overnight bag. Told him they were moving, “fresh start,” new city. “They said they weren’t taking you,” he wrote. “Said you’d be better off with me because they were a mess. I lost it.”
He admitted he’d screamed at them. Called my dad a coward, my mom selfish. He saw the bottle in my dad’s hand. He could’ve taken the keys, called a cab, told them to sleep it off. He didn’t. He let them drive away angry because he wanted to win.
Twenty minutes later, the cops called.
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