She opened her arms and hugged him tightly. "Happy anniversary, Father."
She had expected to feel guilt in his frame. The particular stiffness of a man who knows what he has done and cannot quite make his body forget it.
What she felt instead made her go still.
He trembled. But not with guilt. Not with the frantic, cornered trembling of a guilty conscience — it was raw, entirely unguarded relief. He wrapped his arms around her and *held on*, squeezing far too tight, with the desperate grip of a man who had not been performing grief but living it. Her chest compressed under the force of it.
*Wait.*
The analytical machine behind her warm smile ground to a sudden, disorienting halt.
*...Does this old bastard actually not know?*
She let the possibility sit in her chest like a cold stone as she pulled back. *Did his wife hide it from him entirely?*
