Mom sank onto the floor beside the fallen chair and told me everything. Dad had left Jamaica at nineteen after a bitter fight with his father, never knowing his girlfriend, Rosalind, was pregnant. Rosalind later wrote to him in Minnesota, but the letter reached Mom first, when they were newly engaged. Terrified of losing him, she hid it. More letters followed over the years, with photographs of a growing girl, and Mom locked every one in a trunk in the attic.

Dad found the trunk eleven years ago while searching for Christmas decorations. He read every letter in a single night. Mom expected him to leave, but he sat at the kitchen table and cried, then forgave her. He admitted he had been ashamed of running from his own family in the first place. He wrote to Simone, but afraid of hurting Mom and me, he asked her to wait until he found the right words. That was why he kept staring at the beach photograph, and why he had told me to understand my mother.

The package had come from Simone herself. Her note, tucked under the ribbon, said she was a nurse now, and she had saved enough to send Dad the ticket, with a promise that his room was ready and the rain would be warm. Mom read it and wept so hard she could barely breathe. “I stole all those years from him,” she said. I held her and told her Dad had already forgiven her, which was why he never said one harsh word about it.

Two months later, Mom and I flew to Kingston together. Simone was waiting at the airport with the same dimples I had seen in the photograph, and she hugged me before either of us could speak. I could smell the ocean before I even saw it. That evening, the three of us scattered some of Dad’s ashes on the beach in the warm rain. Mom took Simone’s hand and apologized, and Simone said the only thing that mattered was that we had come. Now I have a sister.