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“My name is Seraphina.”
His eyes grow wide in absolute shock. He gasps and leans back.
“Sera - Seraphina,” he stammers, his eyes trying to take me all in.
“Yes, Seraphina. Your daughter.”
“My daughter.” My father’s voice is churning with shame and guilt; his face falls, sullen and fearful of the fact that he has come face to face with the person he has avoided for almost twenty years.
He cries, heavy, chest-wrenching sobs that cause his body to shake.
I watch him with my head tilted to the side.
“Does it upset you? To meet me?”
“You do not know how long I have dreamed of seeing your face,” He sobs.
“Is that so? Yet, you never reached out to me.”
Despite my calm demeanor on the outside, I'm raging with anxiety on the inside. I have dreamed of coming face to face with the person who killed my mother for my entire life, never expecting it to be my father. Here I am, watching him sob. Seeing him in pain.
“Seraphina, my daughter. You are more beautiful than I could ever have imagined.”
“Please, stop this bullshit. I don’t want to see your tears. I have no pity for you. I know what you did.”
He falls silent, puffing. “You know what I did?”
“And I hate you for it,” I scream, unable to keep myself in control. I stand up and throw my chair across from the container. “I hate you! Do you hear me? Do you feel my words? I hate you with every piece of me.”
His face pinched, silent, ashamed.
“Have you got nothing to say for yourself? Murderer. Killer. Don’t you want to tell me you are innocent, beg me to believe you?” I'm shouting so loud my throat is hurting.
“Please,” he murmurs.
“Please, what? What do you deserve, you sick, ugly, worthless human being? You deserve to live in pain, alone, hated by your own daughter. And I came here to tell you I hate you - to your face.”
“Seraphina. I chose your name. An angel. That is what it means. Seraphim. My angel.”
My angel. That is what Antonio calls me.
“Don’t you dare call me that? I'm nothing to you. You made that clear in your actions and every day since you killed my mother. You have made it clear by not even bothering to know that I exist.”
“I had to.” He screams back at me, overcome with desperation. “I had to do it. You don’t think it eats at my soul every single day.Every breath I take. You don’t think I'm in agony just by existing. You don’t think that every morning I wake up and cry because all I want is to die in my sleep, to end my existence? I had to do it. I loved her. She was everything to me. She was my world, my life, my person. The only person who ever existed to me.”
I stare down at him. The intense emotion that has just flooded out of him has shocked me. I don’t know what I expected, perhaps arrogance? Perhaps false remorse? But not this. Not this pain that is so clear in every word that he choked out now.
“You say you had to? But you say you love her. If someone told me I had to kill the person who I loved, I would never do it.” I spit my words at him. Of course, I'm thinking about Antonio. I couldn’t kill him. I would rather die myself.
“You don’t understand, child.”
“I'm not your child. And seeing as I don’t understand, why don’t you try to explain it to me, old man?”
I'm too agitated to sit down, but I can't pace anymore. I stand in front of him with my hands on my hips, my body so tense I feel like one sudden movement would tear me apart.
“Do it!” I scream. “Tell me how you can justify killing my mother. Your wife. Tell me how you can justify tearing her from my life like that and tossing me aside as though I was nothing to you.”
He fights against himself for a moment, his eyes squeezed shut. I wait. I wait because I have waited my whole life for this, and now that I'm here, I don’t know if I want the answer. No answer can ever bring her back. No answer can change what I went through. Nothing can justify what he did.
