In the fading light of October, when the trees in Cincinnati shed their leaves like secrets too long held, Jonah Mathers found himself walking up the creaking steps of the house he had once called home. The siding was weather-worn, the porch sagging as if tired of holding weight no one dared to speak of. And the door, still painted that peculiar shade of green his father had insisted was “serene,” opened before he knocked.
“Jonah,” said Miriam, his father's nurse, a gentle woman with hands that smelled like antiseptic and almond soap. “He’s awake.”
Jonah nodded, the suitcase in his hand suddenly heavier than before. He hadn’t seen his father in five years. Not since the argument... no, the unraveling that had sent him spiraling back to Boston, where forgetting was easier than forgiving.
Inside, the house smelled of lavender and old pine, a scent both soothing and sterile. He followed the scent down the hall toward the bedroom that used to be his mother’s study. It was now a makeshift hospice room, complete with humming machines and a tray of untouched pudding. His father, Thomas Mathers, lay propped against a sea of pillows, thinner than Jonah remembered, his skin like paper and his mouth pinched with some unspoken pain.
Jonah stood in the doorway. He didn’t know how to speak to the man who had taught him to tie a fishing knot and then, years later, taught him how betrayal could wear the face of someone you loved.
“You came,” Thomas rasped. His voice was dry, like rust scraping against tin.
Jonah shrugged. “I got the call.”
Silence stretched between them, filled only by the beeping of a heart monitor and the slow, labored breath of a man unraveling from life.
“I didn’t expect you,” Thomas said.
“You shouldn’t have,” Jonah replied.
* * * * *
The second family. That was what they were calling it now. As if it had been a mistake tucked away in the attic, a forgotten box of photographs and birth certificates. Two children. A woman named Elise, who lived in a brick house on the other side of town. It was revealed at his mother’s funeral, of all places, when a boy, Jonah’s half-brother, though the word caught in his throat showed up, standing behind the preacher with a look of confusion and sorrow too old for his young face.
Jonah had left that day. Didn’t speak to Thomas again.
Until now.
* * * * *
Thomas gestured weakly to the chair beside his bed. Jonah sat.
“Did you ever love her?” Jonah asked. It came out cold. Sharpened. There was no preamble between them anymore.
His father closed his eyes. “Not the way I loved your mother.”
“That’s not really a comfort.”
“I know,” Thomas whispered.
They sat in silence. Miriam passed by the door with a tray of tea. The house groaned as it settled into night.
“You should meet them,” Thomas said suddenly.
Jonah laughed once, short and bitter. “Why?”
“Because they’re your family.”
“No,” Jonah said, “they’re yours.”
* * * * *
It snowed the next morning. Early for Cincinnati, but not impossible. The flakes fell with a kind of deliberate grace, as if even the sky was careful not to disturb the dying.
Jonah made coffee in the kitchen. Everything was still where his mother had left it. The spice rack, the ceramic jar shaped like a cat, the dent in the wall from the time she’d dropped the cast iron pan during a fight. He touched it, his fingers lingering in the indentation. A memory of noise, of love twisted into something fierce and fragile.
Later, he walked with Miriam to the back garden. The hydrangeas had browned, their heads bowed like mourners.
“He’s asking for you,” she said.
“I don’t know if I can do this.”
“You don’t have to forgive him,” Miriam said, tucking her scarf closer to her neck. “You just have to be here.”
* * * * *
Thomas was worse by nightfall. His eyes clouded, his breath shallow. The machines blinked and buzzed like tired arguments.
Jonah sat by the bed, watching the rise and fall of his father’s chest. He thought about Elise, about the other children, about how close they lived all these years and how oblivious he’d been.
“I was lonely,” Thomas murmured.
Jonah leaned closer. “What?”
“Your mother and I... we loved each other, but we were lonely, too. We lived on different sides of the same house.”
Jonah clenched his jaw. “That’s not an excuse.”
“No,” Thomas said, his voice barely audible. “It’s a truth.”
* * * * *
That night, Jonah wandered through the house. He found the old photograph albums, dusty and tucked beneath the stairs. Page after page of birthdays, vacations, smiles wide and eyes full of unspoken things. He flipped to the back and found newer photos, hidden in an envelope. Pictures of the other children. A boy and a girl. The girl had his father’s eyes.
He sat there until dawn.
* * * * *
Thomas died just before sunrise.
He didn’t say goodbye. No last confession. No poetic redemption. Just a slow fading into stillness, as if even death didn’t want to disturb the air too much.
Jonah stood by the bed, staring at the shape that was no longer his father.
He didn’t cry.
Not then.
* * * * *
The funeral was small. Just close friends, Miriam, and Elise, who stood at the back with her children like a question mark no one wanted to answer. Jonah didn’t approach her. Couldn’t.
Instead, he went home to Boston and boxed up the parts of himself that had unraveled. He told no one about the photographs. About the scent of lavender and rust and the silence that weighed more than words.
Months passed.
One evening, he received a letter. No return address. Inside, a photo of a boy and a girl playing in a garden that looked too familiar. On the back, in careful handwriting:
“We would like to know you, if you’ll let us. ...L.”
Jonah stared at it for a long time.
Then he put it in the drawer with the others.
* * * * *
He never wrote back. Some wounds, he knew, were too deep to be shared. Some families too broken to mend.
But sometimes, when the snow fell soft against the windows, he would take out the picture and stare at it, wondering which side of the house he’d been living on all along.
And if the left side ever truly knew the right.
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