When I am finished, he doesn’t say anything. He lets the silence hang heavy between us, and in the quiet I begin to panic. Perhaps I have made the wrong choice by coming here. Making the wrong choice does seem to be a talent of mine. I wonder if it is something I inherited.

My father’s face is usually so difficult to read, but right now he’s horror-struck. “Oh no,” he mutters to himself. “Oh, Frances, oh no.” Tears well in his eyes and fall down his face, splattering all over the papers on his desk. “Oh, Frances. Please forgive me,” he cries.

I’m taken aback. I expected anger, but not this.

“What is it?”

“It’s the reason I left.”

“What?” I recoil.

My father shakes his head. He looks so profoundly sad my heart breaks for him. “There’s a myth about the veil, that only two fated souls can open it together. When I was twenty-two, a clairvoyant told me the Hallowell name was cursed, that she saw me in front of the veil. It scared me so badly I packed my bags and left the next day. I thought it was your mother and me. It was you and Finn all along.”

I’m too numb to feel much of anything, but here it is, what I’ve been searching for, the reason he left us. A braver man would have stayed, would have told the truth, wouldn’t have taken the easy way out. But the smallest bit of my heart twinges for him. I wish for a lot of things, for a brother who is alive, for a mother who could love me in the way I desperately wanted to be loved, for a father who is less of a coward.

If Finn were here, he’d laugh and say, I told you so. He was so insistent the universe wanted us by each other’s sides, in each other’s heads. Maybe I never could help the way I feel about him, maybe this feeling in my chest that I can’t seem to excise was never my fault. Does that absolve me or make me just as cowardly as my father? Fate may incline us, but we control our actions.

“It’s not fair,” I say.

“What isn’t?” my father asks.

“You were the one who got to do the leaving. I was the one who got left.”

He takes my words like a blow, physically recoiling. “I’m sorry.”

After nineteen years, I get the apology I’ve been craving all my life. It doesn’t make me feel any better. I don’t feel much of anything at all.

He wipes the tears from his cheeks and pushes back from the desk decisively. The legs squeak against the cold tile floors, the facade rising once more. He claps his hands together. “I will handle it. It is my duty.”