The sentence still rings inside my head like a cracked bell. A stray dog, a quiet street, a warm evening — nothing about that moment suggested my life was about to split open like an old scar. Yet it did. And it wasn’t the broken metal that hurt the most, but the truth it dragged out of the shadows.

The collie darted around the corner with frantic energy, the kind of wild joy only animals understand. No aggression, no warning — just a sudden collision with a piece of me that was never truly mine. The impact wasn’t loud. More like a thin, humiliating snap.
I felt myself falling before I even realized the prosthetic had given way.

People rushed toward me — some shocked, some curious, some already raising their phones. Funny how quickly compassion turns into content.

The dog whimpered beside me, guilty for something it could never comprehend. And in the middle of all that chaos, a single image struck me with terrifying clarity: my father’s silhouette — tall, still, and haunted by secrets he never dared to speak.

You see, he was never just a father.
Not really.

His movements were too deliberate. His eyes — too watchful. His warnings — too strange to belong to an ordinary man. When he taught me to walk with the prosthetic, it felt less like therapy and more like training. Preparing me for… what?
Survival? Escape?
Something he feared but never named.

“Don’t trust the ground,” he used to say. “It can betray you faster than a person.”
Back then, I thought he was being dramatic. Now I’m not so sure.

When he died, they said it was his heart.
But hearts don’t explain sealed folders with half-erased names.
They don’t explain coded letters tucked behind photographs.
They don’t explain the men who visited at night and called him by titles I didn’t understand.

And they definitely don’t explain the last message he left me — shaky, rushed, almost prophetic:

“If anything happens to me, protect your left side. It will always be your weak point.”

But I didn’t lose my left side.
I lost my right leg.

For years that contradiction gnawed at me. Then I buried it under school, under work, under the daily mechanics of pretending to live normally. But on that street, with my prosthetic fractured like dry bone, something inside me cracked too — and everything flooded back.

As I lay on the asphalt, I wasn’t thinking about the pain.
I was thinking about him.
About the life he lived in the shadows.
About the way he seemed to anticipate threats no one else could see.
About the fear he tried so hard to hide from me — and failed.

Maybe he wasn’t wrong.
Maybe he just didn’t have time to explain everything.

The collie’s owner cried. A neighbor helped me stand. The crowd thinned.
But the silence that followed was the kind that grows teeth.

Because in that silence, one truth settled painfully clear:

My father’s world didn’t end with him.
It’s still here. Waiting. Watching.
And the broken prosthetic wasn’t an accident — it was a signal.

A reminder that I can’t keep pretending his secrets died with him.

Whether I want it or not, something is pulling me back into the story he never finished telling.
And for the first time, I’m terrified not of what happened — but of what I’m about to discover.