HELOISE SAW THE man from behind and wondered why the guard had sent her into the wrong room. It wasn’t her father sitting there at the metal table under the fluorescent light that was flickering tremulously from the lamps above him.

It was a frail old man, whose hair—with the exception of a couple of dark tufts at his temples—had gone completely white. An old, emaciated man. He sat there with his shoulders slumped and his head stooped so his spine was clearly visible through his orange prison uniform, like the spikes on a stegosaurus’s back.

But then the image changed before Heloise’s eyes as she passed the man, like a work of art—an anamorphosis—that depicted one thing when viewed from one angle but appeared to dissolve and transform into something totally different when viewed from another. It didn’t take more than a few seconds. The old man looked up when he heard her approaching. He looked into her eyes, and then she knew.

Heloise looked into his warm, dark-brown eyes, at the scar across his left cheekbone from the swings at the playground by Saint Paul’s Church, at the mouth, which curved upward into a tentative smile as he exhaled in relief.

“Heloise,” he said, getting up gingerly from his seat.

Stunned, she took a step back and remained there, about five feet from the table, as she looked at him without saying anything.

She almost couldn’t believe her eyes. It was like finding a fossil of the man she had been raised by, deep inside a soulless block of cement. He looked so much older than she remembered him, modified, unfamiliar. He looked like a stranger. And yet …

It was really him.

“Heloise,” he repeated. “Sweetheart?”

He reached out a hand toward her.

Heloise stared at it for several seconds. Then she looked him in the eye again, still without saying anything.

She wanted to hate him, to be cruel and nasty, to tell him that he meant nothing to her, that she no longer loved him. But something welled up inside her as she looked at him, a tenderness. And even though she tried with all her might to suppress the feeling, she knew it would never disappear completely. It would always be there inside her.

For him.

He slowly pulled his hand back. Then he nodded hesitantly to the empty chair across the table from him.

“Would you like to sit down?”

Heloise took a deep breath. She felt dizzy. Her chest quivered and trembled, and her vision seemed cloudy, as if she were wearing a pair of glasses with the wrong prescription.

She looked down at the floor and blinked a couple of times. Then she walked over to the table and pulled out the chair. She sat down across from him, and he lowered his frail body back onto the hard metal seat again.