“Why didn’t you tell me?” His voice cracked under the weight of the years. “Why didn’t you tell me I had daughters?”
Tears slid down her face, cutting clean lines through the dirt on her cheeks.
“I was scared,” she said. “You were just starting your company. You were working nonstop. When I found out I was pregnant — with twins — I panicked. I thought I’d ruin everything you were building.”
“You decided that for me?” Michael’s voice broke. “You took nine years from me. Nine years with my children.”
The girls watched them, confused by the tension in voices they didn’t understand.
“I tried,” Sarah said quickly. “I worked cleaning houses, waitressing… anything. But when I started showing, they let me go. After the girls were born, it was worse. No childcare. No family. We lost our apartment. We’ve been on the streets for three years.”
Three years.
Michael felt sick.
While he had been traveling for meetings and celebrating business expansions, his daughters had been sleeping under bridges.
“Why didn’t you look for me when it got this bad?” he asked.
Sarah looked at him with tired honesty.
“I thought you’d moved on. And I thought if I showed up, you’d think I was after your money.”