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"I thought you were still too raw with sorrow for any of that. Isn't that what you told Mr. McRae?" she pointed out. stabbing me with her hard.

penetrating gaze.

"Thank you for all you've done. Aunt Agnes." I said with a smile. "We all had better get some rest." I added as if I hadn't heard her comment.

Margaret Selby was already closing her eyes.

I turned and left them both in the living room. When I entered Daddy's office, I closed the door behind me and snapped the lock. Then I went to his desk and, for the first time, sat in his chair. I opened the drawer and put the envelope on the desk. For a long moment. I just stared at it All the preparations. the instructions, had frightened me a bit. What did this envelope contain?

Slowly, I worked it open using Daddy's ivory letter opener, and then I pulled out a packet of paper filled with his writing.

I took another deep breath and began to read the first page. It was a letter to me.

.

Dear Willow,

Let me begin by first begging. for your forgiveness. What you are about to learn should have been something you have known all your life. Just about every other child does, or certainly should. It has been the heaviest burden of my life carrying this secret inside me. The truth of it is that your mother did not know this, either. There were times I feared she would come to suspect it but ironically, her devotion to herself her interest in herself blinded her. Actually, I think of the saying "There are none so blind as those who will not see. She wouldn't look for these revelations. She wouldn't see them if they were right here front of her. Perhaps she was better off Sometimes, it is better to be in some ignorance.

I can't deny I was tempted to leave you in some ignorance, but I knew in my heart that would be unfair. What I did not have the courage to do was to reveal the enclosed while I was still alive. There are several reasons for my cowardice, I suppose, but none of them justifies it.

Even so, I beg for your forgiveness. Believe me when I tell you I have suffered more than you will, and believe me when I tell you my most important reason was always to be sure you would be a happy person, I hope and pray you still will be.

I know I never said it enough, and it can never be said too much, but I want you to begin with this knowledge:

I love you, Willow,

I love you.

Daddy

.

The tears rolling down my face were falling onto the paper. I pushed it aside and flicked them off my cheeks as fast as they were coming. For a long moment. I sat there, fighting to catch my breath, fighting to ease the ache in my chest. It finally subsided. I swallowed the lump in my throat and sat forward again, my fingers trembling as I peeled away the top sheet and began to read the next page.

It began:

If someone had told one that someday I would fall in love with one of my patients, I would have recommended that he or she become one of my patients.

Now I have to admit that this most improbable event has occurred.

3

The Truth Revealed

.

I don't know how many times my father's

miniature grandfather clock bonged the hour. I never heard it after I began to read his diary. I was mesmerized, fascinated to the point of forgetting time, forgetting fatigue. I was glued to his chair and read through most of the night, pausing occasionally to take a breath, to cry, to laugh. Often, I lifted my eves from the pages to ask myself again and again, were these my father's words? Were these the words, the descriptions, the utterances of the man I knew?

The author of these words did not seem like a man who saw the world through a doctor's clinical eves. This wasn't the organized. at times unemotional man I knew, the man who was afraid to hug me, to hold my hand, to kiss my cheek, the man I never saw cry, not even at my adoptive mother's funeral.

The man in these pages was a man who could feel things deeply, whose emotional roller coaster went from deep melancholy to utter ecstasy, whose pronouncements of love brought a blush to my cheeks, whose words rivaled the pages of the best romance novel.

He moved quickly into a warm, detailed description of how he fell in love with his patient Grace Montgomery, and even how he began to make love to her. The clinic, which to me had seemed a cold, bare world, suddenly took on the ambience of a romantic escape. He actually wrote: I couldn't wait to get there every morning. It was as if I had found the doorway to paradise.

Daddy's descriptions of the views of the river running behind the clinic, even the halls and the rooms in the evening, the music he used to calm patients-- all of it took on a beauty and warmth I never knew existed for him.