My mother kept a journal for thirty-one years and I read all of it in the four days after her funeral, and now I know something about my family that I will take to my own grave.

My father is not my father. Not in the way that matters to a geneticist, anyway. She wrote it down in 1991 in the same handwriting she used for grocery lists, like she was recording the weather. Four paragraphs. A man she worked with. She ended it before I was born and she never told anyone, and then she wrote on the next page about needing to buy snow tires.

I have spent six months deciding what to do with that and I have decided to do nothing, which is its own kind of decision.

Here is what nobody warns you about. I thought the hard part would be the anger. It isn't. The hard part is that I now watch my dad do ordinary things and I grieve a relationship that is still happening. He called me last Tuesday to ask how to reset his router.

He's seventy-six. He ends every call the same way he has since I was a kid, and I have to hold the phone away from my face now.

My sister doesn't know. If I tell her, she loses her father too, and she's closer to him than I am. If I tell him, I take his wife away from him after he already lost her, and he can't even ask her about it. There is no version of telling the truth here where the truth helps anybody who's still alive.

So I'm carrying it, and I'm finding out that carrying something isn't passive. It costs something every day. I'm shorter with my wife. I've stopped calling my sister as much because I'm afraid it'll come out sideways. I am a worse person than I was in March, and the reason is a secret that isn't even mine.

I don't know what I'm asking. Maybe just whether anyone else is sitting on something that would only hurt people if it came out, and whether you eventually stop feeling like a liar for keeping it.