I worked my way through the living room and the bedrooms in a matter of hours, feeling nothing but a dull urge to get it over with. It wasn’t until I reached the hallway ceiling hatch that my stomach tied into a knot.

I pulled down the folding stairs to the attic, coughing as a cloud of dust rained down.

I climbed up into the sweltering heat, expecting to find old Christmas decorations or broken furniture. Instead, the attic was mostly empty, save for the far corner. Tucked away under a heavy canvas tarp was a single cardboard box. Written on the side in thick black marker, in my father’s unmistakable handwriting, was my name.

My breath hitched in my throat. I knelt on the dusty floorboards and pulled the tarp away. The tape on the box was old and yellowing, brittle enough that I could break it with my fingernails. I opened the flaps, expecting to find old birthday cards or baby clothes.

Sitting right on top was a faded, blue notebook covered in peeling band stickers. My high school diary. I stared at it, completely paralyzed. It was the exact notebook I used to hide under my mattress when I was fifteen. It was the safe haven where I poured out every miserable, furious, heartbreaking thought I ever had about my parents’ divorce.

I remembered writing pages upon pages of pure vitriol about my father. I wrote about how much I hated him, how I wished he would die, how he was a monster who broke my mother’s heart. I had lost the diary right around the time I turned seventeen and always assumed it had accidentally ended up in the trash during spring cleaning.

Why was it here? How did he get it? My hands were physically shaking as I picked it up.

The cover felt rough and familiar under my fingertips. I cracked the spine, expecting to just cringe at my dramatic teenage angst, or maybe feel a fresh wave of anger at him for invading my privacy.

I flipped to the middle of the book, right around the time of my sixteenth birthday. As my eyes adjusted to the page, all the breath left my lungs. I let out a loud gasp, dropping the book onto the attic floorboards. My father wasn’t reading the diary.

He was answering it. There, written in the margins next to my tear-stained, angry teenage handwriting, were notes. The ink was faded, written in his neat, cramped print. Next to a paragraph where I had written, “He doesn’t care about us at all. He left for a younger woman because we weren’t good enough for him,” there was a note in blue pen: “I never stopped caring.

There was never another woman. I just needed you to have someone to blame so you wouldn’t blame her.” My heart hammered against my ribs like a trapped bird. I snatched the book off the floor, my eyes frantically scanning the pages.