Then he pointed to the last photograph pinned to the wall.
It was the final picture of my father and me together.
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Underneath it was a single sentence in his handwriting.
“If I can’t be there when she finally starts chasing her dream, let my brother stand beside her in my place.”
I looked at Richard.
Only a few hours earlier, I had almost run away from him.
Now he was sitting across from me, barely holding back his own tears.
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“So that’s why you were acting so strangely?”
He gave a quiet laugh.
“I’ve never been good at keeping secrets.”
Then I remembered something.
I looked at him.
“And why did you ask me if I was a virgin?”
His face immediately turned red.
For a moment, he looked completely embarrassed.
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“I was trying to ask whether you were serious with someone, whether you were building your life around another person, whether you were making your own decisions.”
I stared at him.
“And somehow that became, ‘Are you a virgin?’”
Richard covered his face with one hand.
“I know. It may have been the worst question I’ve ever asked in my life.”
For the first time that day, I laughed.
That night, we stayed in Room 214 until almost midnight, opening my father’s letters one by one.
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Three months later, I opened my little photography studio.
On opening day, the first photograph I put on the wall wasn’t one of my own.
It was an old picture of my father and Richard when they were young.
Underneath it, I wrote just one sentence:
“Sometimes the door you are most afraid to open does not hide your greatest fear… but the love of someone who spent years waiting for you to finally find it.”
