It was her first time seeing her father since she was eleven years old. He was as giant, dark, and handsome as she remembered and she resented him for it. Without any verbal communication, he understood that the short, colorful girl, no – lady, that stood before him was his beloved daughter, Ezra. The two studied each other briefly before deciding that a hug would be too strange and settled on a handshake. A few hours and a couple buses later, the distant duo sat across from each other in a mid-city Atlanta diner. The kind of diner that only old folks and new age hipsters knew about. Mediocre food yet quality service. The servers talked to their customers on a first name basis, as if they were all long lost friends who could go years without seeing each other but always pick up where they left off. Ezra ordered a short stack of pancakes with a cup of coffee, black. She actually hated coffee but when she agreed to meet up with Evan she promised herself she would not let him see any ounce of who she really was. They had been together for hours and only a handful of words had been shared between them. Elementary comments about the bus rides and mutual complaints about how it was still so hot in the middle of autumn. They both agreed climate change was a real problem. “So, I'm guessing we should address the elephant in the room.” Evan's sudden brevity startled Ezra. Ever since she had gotten an odd email stating that her father, whom she hadn't heard from in twelve years, wanted to meet up, she couldn't stop thinking about all of the possible reasons he had chosen to contact her now. Was he dying? Did he come into a large sum of money and wanted to make up for his years of absence by offering to pay all of her student loans that she had acquired, trying to make something of herself? She stared at Evan. This man. This asshole of a man, who had left her and her mother to fend for themselves the summer just before starting junior high. This scum of a man, whose disappearance had caused her mother to slip into manic depression, forcing Ezra to become an adult long before the age she could buy a cigarette. This coward of a man, who had promised her that he would see her the next morning after tucking her into bed, kissing her on the forehead, only to never return. What could this son of a bitch possibly want to say to her, now? “Ezra, this isn't easy for me to do. Nor is it clear how I should start so I guess I'll just start by saying how sorry I –“ “No.” “No?” “No. Don't start there. Don't start by trying to make me feel sorry for you. Not like that. Try something else.” Tears were already filling up in her eyes but another promise she had made to herself was that she would wait until she got home that night to cry. She wasn't going to let Evan see her weak. Evan readjusted himself in the booth. He was visibly caught off guard by Ezra's interruption. The wrinkles in his forehead folded as he nervously looked down at his hands. “Okay. Ezra, I know you may have been too young to understand at the time but your father was a drug addict.” Ezra already knew this. Her mother had spent what felt like eternity explaining to Ezra that her daddy's absence wasn't to any fault of her own but his selfish love for the happy dust or the white lady as her mother so often referred to his addiction. As if his love for crack was the equivalent to a man cheating on his wife with another woman. And in a way, it was exactly equivalent to that. The same emotions, the same heartache, the same end result. Sadness. She listened on as Evan continued to explain himself. “I tried to quit several times. For you. For your mom. I was just, I was too weak.” “Why'd you leave?” Ezra stared ahead. She stared way beyond the withered upholstered booth where they both sat. Way past the unadorned brick walls of the shoddy diner. Into the abyss of answer-less questions and nebulous dimensions of unknowable what ifs and could-have-beens. “I didn't want to hurt you, or Syd. I figured your life would be better off without me in it fucking it up. I couldn't continue to see the look of hurt in your mom's face when she looked at me. The level of disappointment... it was too much to bare.” Evan's dark brown eyes held his own tears hostage. The only visible sadness in his face was the missing front tooth he did well hiding. Years of practice Ezra figured. “Well, good for you Evan. You spared us. I'm so glad that instead of spending time and money helping you get back on your feet, we were able to just get on with our lives. I'm glad that you made our lives easier by just quitting it. You're a real gentleman.” Ezra picked up her purse and scoured for a few dollars to pay for her cold, uneaten pancakes. Paying for her own untouched meal would be the ultimate jab before she slipped into the stillness of the night and never wondered about Evan again. He grabbed her by the hand, firm yet very carefully. “Please Ezra. Please. What can I do? Just tell me. I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.” This time he released his captive tears. His once handsome, strong face had turned into liquid within a few seconds. His hard exterior dissolved into a puddle of mush onto the restaurant floor. Ezra sat. While she held great resentment in her heart, she held even more empathy for a crying, grown man. Runaway father or not. The pair sat silent for a while. Background noise from the patrons of the shitty diner seemed to dissolve parallel to the anger of Ezra. It was two a.m. and here she sat with the only man she had ever both loved and hated in a red and blue booth of a restaurant that served both fried fish and brioche french toast that tasted neither good or bad. Stranger things had happened. Without knowing whether the silence was comfortable or uneasy, Ezra racked her brain for something, anything, to say next. “So... are you clean now? Do you still, you know, use?” Her voice took an accidental concerned tone. They both noticed it. “No, no. I've been clean for quite a while now. I go to NA meetings almost every day. I even have a few young guys that I sponsor.” “Good. That's good. Where do you live?” She no longer chose to hide her interest. She wanted to know everything about him. Where he lived. What he liked to do. Why he never called. “Alpharetta. I have an apartment out there. A little ways out.” Now. This was her opening. This was her doorway into the intangible rabbit hole of everything she had ever wondered about as a young adolescent. “Alone?” Her voice cracked. Evan took a sip of his water. He too had anticipated this meeting. This question. This inevitable conversation he would have to have with his not so little, little girl. His precious daughter, his beautiful Ezra, whom he had no longer known. “No. Not alone, no.” Another awkward sip of water. Ezra stared into his eyes. Not past him. Not at the brick wall. She stared straight into the man that was once upon a time her favorite person in the whole world. Her protector. Her dad. He continued. “I live with my wife. Loren.” Ezra nodded, giving permission to elaborate. “She's an accountant. We met at the bank.” He laughed a little bit at what he believed to be perfect irony. Ezra forced a smile. That was practice. She had no interest in what woman her father was seeing now. She didn't care about that at all. She didn't care what she did for a living. She didn't care how they met. She even could have lived her whole life without ever knowing her name. That was all just the proper setup. The setup for her real question. She conjured it up in her stomach and forced it out of her mouth, almost violently. “Kids? Do you have any other kids?” She cleared her throat. Evan's forehead crinkled up again. In the short time of Ezra knowing her “new” father, she had already noticed that this was a nervous reaction. She braced herself for whatever came next. “Yes. I have, we have a daughter, Camille. She plays soccer. For her school. She wants to be a lawyer when she grows up.” Evan nervously tip toed around in his speech. Not knowing what was too little or too much to say about Camille. Of course he didn't want to offend Ezra by telling her he had another daughter who he didn't walk out on. Another life that he didn't choose to quit. The life he chose over the white lady, over Syd, over Ezra. Ezra smiled again, forcefully and determined to power through what she yearned to know for the past twelve years of her life. “How old is she?” Evan closed his eyes, longer than what could be surpassed as a blink. He took a subtle deep breath. So subtle that if Ezra hadn't been studying his every move since they met, she would have missed it. But she didn't. She really didn't. “She's ten.” Her heart melted to the floor to join the puddle of mush her father had made not too long ago. Two years. It had taken her father only two years to move on from the life he had made with his high school sweetheart Sydney and their adventurous, wild spirited little girl. Ezra's life flashed before her eyes as she tried hard to remember what her life was like two years after her father had left their Druid Hills home twelve years ago. She searched her brain but didn't have to for long. She remembered vividly. Ten years ago to the day, this day, October twelfth. The same day she had met up with her long lost father in the heart of Atlanta to eat pancakes and drink black coffee. She had just gotten home from school. She remembers this day particularly by the smell. It was a peculiar smell, something resembling pumpkin pie but not quite homemade. She remembers the cold breeze in the house despite all of the windows being closed. Despite the thermostat being set to seventy one as it always was. She remembers walking up the stairs, eager to see her mother, Syd, to tell her about the Fall dance that was coming up at school. About how her and her friends all decided that they would all wear white, despite it being after Labor Day. How Lewis Giovanni had asked her to be his date but she turned him down because her mother had told her she had to be sixteen to date. She remembers opening her mother's bedroom door which was already strange in itself because she always kept her door open. She remembers walking towards her mother's still body underneath her favorite burgundy fleece blanket. She remembers shaking her mother repeatedly only for her to never wake up again. She remembers seeing the empty prescription bottle on her mother's nightstand. Paroxetine. The same medicine that was prescribed to her shortly after Evan left. To help cope with the loss of her high school sweetheart. Her coward ass, selfish ass, love of her life. Ezra remembers all of this in the short silence after learning of the existence of her ten year old sister, Camille. Who plays soccer. And wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. She learns that she is no longer the only child of Evan Lancaster, and actually hasn't been for a while. She learns that somewhere out in the universe there is another girl who shares half of her. Who owns the life that was stripped away from her at age eleven on a summer day in a Druid Hills bungalow then again at age thirteen in the same sad house. She smiles at her dad. “When can I meet her?”