Joaquin opened it with shaking hands. He read it standing in the doorway of that cheap motel room.
I never read the letter. It’s his. But I watched his face while he read it. I watched thirty-one years of something heavy finally slide off a man’s shoulders.
When he finished, he folded it very carefully and held it against his chest. Then he and my father hugged in that doorway, two old men, crying like children.
Before we left, Joaquin asked, very quietly, if he could see her.
So we brought him to the NICU. He washed his hands at the sink for a full two minutes, the way he’d been trained thirty-one years ago. Then he sat down beside my daughter’s incubator and slid his big, rough hand through the porthole.
She grabbed his finger. Her whole tiny fist barely reached around it.
Joaquin didn’t say anything for a long time. He just sat there, letting her hold on.
