After 3 years in prison, I came home to find my father dead and my stepmother in his house. “He was buried a year ago,” she said coldly. She didn’t know he’d left me a secret letter with a key. It led me to a storage unit, and a video he’d made before he d;ie;d. “She framed you,” he said.

The first breath of freedom didn’t taste like liberty. It tasted like diesel fumes, bitter coffee, and the metallic tang of a bus station at dawn—a flavor that suggested the world had moved on without bothering to pause for me. I walked out of the heavy iron gate clutching a clear plastic bag that contained the sum total of my existence: two flannel shirts, a paperback copy of The Count of Monte Cristo with the spine broken, and the kind of heavy silence you accumulate after three years of being told your voice is irrelevant.

But as I stepped onto the cracked pavement, I wasn’t thinking about the past. I wasn’t thinking about the cell, the noise, or the injustice.

I was thinking about one thing.

My father.