The page I opened next wasn't dated.
But it was different.
It began with a name.
"Adrian."
It wasn't a journal entry.
It was a letter.
---
Letter — David to Adrian
"I don't know when you'll read this. Maybe long after I'm gone. Maybe never. But if you are… if somehow this finds its way to you… then there's something I need to say. Something no one ever told me, and something I should've known."
"You are mine."
"They never told me. Joe — he thought he was protecting me. Maybe he was. Maybe I wouldn't have survived knowing that she died, and left behind the one thing I might've lived for."
"But I know now. I see it in your eyes. The way you sit in silence when everyone else speaks. The way you carry people's stories like weights you never asked for. That's me. That's mine."
"And I am sorry, my son."
"When I met you, you were five. A boy with questions. I thought you were Jonathan's legacy. I treated you like his — loved you like his. But there was a part of me, quiet and trembling, that whispered maybe you were also mine, for Joe had made me what I had become, saving me from being nothing. I'm sorry for him being a drunkard, the secrets I made him carry where too much to bear and I don't blame him for turning to the bottle."
"You called me 'sir' when maybe I should've been 'dad'. You waited for me to see it. I was too blind yet there was that look in your eyes that I feared yet I never let myself understand it. Joe waited for me to ask him about you but I never did and the Joe I knew didn't have the guts to start the conversation about him not telling me about my son. And I waited for permission to believe it."
"Forgive me for not knowing sooner. Forgive me for not asking. Forgive me for all the years you had to live a lie."
"You are Adrian. My son. My blood. My second chance."
---
That night, I re-read the letter a dozen times.
And then I found another envelope, tucked beneath the last page — sealed, addressed in Jonathan's handwriting:
"To Adrian. When the silence is too loud."
Inside was a single sentence.
"He was never just The Listener — he was the father the world didn't let him be."
---
Jonathan .
He'd always wanted to tell us. He had anticipated that David would question my origin or that David would see through the illusion he had created yet he didn't.
And everything he did — raising me, leaving me in David's care, hiding the truth until I was ready — it was for this, because David had been too blind to see it and he-Joe was tired of living a lie, of hiding the truth from the two people he loved the most in the world
So I could understand that love isn't always loud.
Sometimes, it leaves letters.
I sat with the journal open in my lap, the dusk light pressing against the window like a memory trying to get in.
David was gone.
Jonathan was gone.
And I was the last one left to carry the weight of the truth.
But this time, it didn't feel like a weight.
---
I flipped back through the pages. Through the hurt. Through the betrayals. Through Makanaka. Through the quiet years abroad. Through the return. Through Joe's silence, and the son he raised without admitting the truth.
I finally understood Joe's descent — his drinking, his avoidance, his haunted eyes.
He hadn't just been carrying guilt.
He'd been protecting me.
And punishing himself.
---
I visited his grave.
I said nothing.
Not because I had nothing to say — but because some silences are sacred.
Some silences are acknowledgements.
Some silences are answers.
---
When I closed the journal for the final time, I didn't cry.
Instead, I opened a new one.
On the first page, I wrote:
"I am Adrian. A son of a drunkard who kept a secret and a son of a lawyer, who listened to all who had a burden to share.
I am the son of a silence that lasted too long.
But I will not inherit his quietness, I shall speak"
David had spent his life listening.
Holding stories.
Hiding truths.
But he gave me something more valuable than answers.
He gave me the courage to ask.
To speak.
To be.
---
I visited the orphanage where he grew up.
They remembered him — the quiet one. The boy with story-eyes.
I spoke to Takunda.
He didn't say much — just nodded, then pulled me into the kind of embrace that says:
"I knew he had something left to give."
And he did.
He gave me everything.
In silence.
In words.
In legacy.
---
I'm writing now.
Not just to remember him — but to become what he never had the chance to be:
A father who speaks.
A man who feels.
A soul unafraid to make noise.
Because for years, The Listener taught others to heal.
And now, I will teach them to speak.
Now I knew her name, "Makanaka". David left me closure and a peace of mind so O could live well, its up to me now how I will survive in this world.
---