I learned my father could not read from the birthday card

Dear Delyara, My father turned sixty-three today. I bought him a birthday card with a long message about fathers being heroes, and when I handed it to him, he smiled, held it too far from his face, then passed it to my younger brother and said, “Read what your sister has written.” At first I thought he had forgotten his glasses. Later, my mother told me he never learned to read properly. He left school at nine and spent his whole life hiding it. He memorised bus numbers, recognised medicines by colour, and asked us to “double-check” letters he had already pretended to understand. I am thirty-seven years old and had never known. Suddenly, so many childhood moments changed shape: the forms he brought home for me to explain, the newspapers he folded without opening, the way he always asked me to read restaurant menus aloud as though he valued my opinion. Tonight, after the guests left, I found him alone with the card. He was tracing the printed words with one finger. I sat beside him and read it slowly, without making the moment feel like a lesson. When I finished, he said, “I knew that is what it said.” I told him I knew he did. It was the kindest lie I could think of.