“My uncle once asked me, ‘Are you a virgin?’ when I was already 27 years old. From that moment, I started to be afraid of him. And a few days later, when he took me to a hotel outside the city, he leaned close to my ear by the pool and whispered, ‘After the pool, come up to my room…’”

Richard shook his head slowly, reaching down to pick up a thick manila folder filled with yellowed pages. He opened it and slid a document across the polished wooden table toward where I was sitting.

“Your father wasn’t just an engineer, Emily, and his death two years ago was not as accidental as the police report suggested,” Richard revealed, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper. “He was involved in a massive corporate whistleblowing case that went all the way to the federal courts.”…

I looked down at the paper in front of me, my eyes scanning paragraphs detailing a severe workplace accident, corporate negligence, and a high-profile lawsuit handled by a prominent personal injury lawyer back in the nineties.

“Wait, my father was involved in a lawsuit?” I asked, my breath catching in my throat as the pieces of the puzzle began to click together. “Why didn’t anyone ever talk about this? Why did he act like his past didn’t exist?”
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