She had driven him to every appointment herself, she wrote, parking two streets over so I would not see her car and ask questions. She had sat in waiting rooms for hours. She had learned the name of every medication, every therapy, every small exercise that might call another piece of him back from the dark.
She had been rebuilding my father, one quiet appointment at a time, while I thought she was just an aging woman growing stranger and more stubborn with her charity.
She wrote that she had spent those same two years quietly fighting the old insurance company, and that the settlement for his accident, stalled and denied for twenty years, had finally, finally come through, enough that he would never want for anything again.
She wrote that she had been waiting until he was well enough, and provided for enough, to be your father again, Hannah. And that she had run out of time before she could tell you herself.
