The meeting I never thought I would experience

A week later, a tall man with black hair and my eyes got out of a car in front of the house. He stopped at the gate, just as Raluca had stopped in the kitchen doorway that evening. I recognized him before he could say a word. It was that short cry from the clinic, now a full-fledged man.

We didn’t throw ourselves into each other’s arms like in the movies. We looked at each other for a long time, both held out our hands at the same time, then hugged without saying anything. Raluca was crying behind me. Andrei whispered in my ear that the family that had raised him had been good to him, but that he had always felt an emptiness that he couldn’t explain. Now he knew.

That afternoon, the four of us sat at the kitchen table—me, Adrian, Raluca, and Andrei, the son I had mourned as dead for almost half a century. My father had died long ago, carrying with him a guilt he had never confessed. And I, at sixty-six, understood that it was never too late to come to light. Sometimes, an old photo in a group for singles isn’t looking for love. It’s looking for justice. And, every now and then, it finds it.