Papa looked older than his age – he could have passed for being over eighty, when I knew this wasn’t the fact.

“I missed you,” he rasped, taking my hand and patting it good heartedly. “I haven’t seen you in a long time.”

“I know, papa,” I said, wiping away my tears angrily. “I’m sorry that I didn’t come sooner.”

“Now you’ll start saying that the Atlantic isn’t small enough, and that it’s its fault for you arriving only a little later,” my father laughed, sounding much like an evil witch in a Halloween commercial.

“How did this happen, papa? There’s no history of disease in our family,” I managed to say, my voice becoming thick with tears.

“I think…I think that it may have happened in Vietnam,” he said, closing his eyes.

“What? That’s over! It was so many years ago,” I said, blinking incredulously. “It would have shown itself much earlier than now!”

There was silence.

“You didn’t hide anything from me, did you?” I whispered, feeling terrified.

“At first I thought it was nothing…”