Sally's Last Wish(Adesola Orimalade) Dan had left his good paying job as a communication engineer to be with Sally. Ever since he could remember, Sally was who everyone called Mum. He learnt later to call her Sally.

"I have been diagnosed with cancer, son. The hospital people say i have a short time left," She sobbed. He could feel her pain. He gripped the receiver so tight his knuckles turned pink. "And you are all I have left." She had called him that late November evening. Dan loved his mum and still drove at least once a month to spend a weekend with Sally. So he just packed, resigned his job and left for Newport.

Colling and Krasner was one of the top communication companies in the state of Wyoming and Dan was a key member of the team. Since Krasner was out of the country, Dan broke the news to Colling. A smallish man in his late forties, Steve Colling understood the emotion. He had once quit his job to leave with his dad who had been diagnosed with lung cancer.

"Wish her well for me". As he held the door open for Dan he patted his shoulder and whispered to him, "Your job will be waiting if you decide to come back".

Less than a month later and looking weaker than ever, Dan walked into her room and paused to look at the woman lying on the bed.

He gently drew the blind, trying not to wake her. He got to the door when he moved her head a little bit. He stopped. "Good morning mum. How are you today?" They chatted for a while, then she asked him to locate his father for her. "I want to see him again. Before I die.", she said.

Why she would want that beats him. The idiot had walked out on them when Dan was just five years. He had never forgiven him. Not just because he left them but because he did so for another woman.

The search took him another two months and he had to enlist the help of a friend in the police department who knew some other low-life's who eventually tracked down the man he wanted.

When he walked into the Madison Correctional Facility, the figure that introduced himself as Dr. Warren was not recognizable. Gaunt, receding hairline with enough grey on it, he looked like someone who had been through a lot.

Their first meeting was clumsy. They said nothing. Dr Warren kept looking at him as if unsure if this man was his son. He asked after him, Sally and his sister, but the questions were hollow; devoid of emotion or feeling.

"What are you in for?" He forced himself to ask.

"Murder."

Dan never told him why he came and how he located him. He did not ask. He later found out that his father had fallen into hard times and with his mistress threatening to leave him he killed her. The motive? An insurance taken out on the mistress. He was lucky not to be going to the chair.

When he returned to Newport he was met by the family physician.

"She won't last too long." He tried a reassuring smile but it was too much to bear. Dr. Craig left, his handkerchief wiping his eyes as he did. Dan understood, Dr. Craig had been the family physician for a long time. It started a long while ago before Dan was born. He had known his father and been with them through the break-up of the family. He had shared the family's grief. A bachelor all his life, somehow he felt touched by the destruction of a 'stable family', as he once told a friend.

Dan even once thought that they; Dr. Craig and Sally, were having a fling, after his father left of course. Though in pain she recognized him when he walked in and took her small hand in his.

"Did you?"

He shook his head. "Searched everywhere. No records, nothing. It is as if he just disappeared."

Later that night she died peacefully in her sleep.

"I couldn't tell her that the man she loved and still loves was now a murderer. She deserved to die peacefully," Dan later wrote in his diary. Dr. Warren? Dan went a couple of times to see him but when he returned to his job he lost touch and gradually the letters stopped.

His last letter to his father read: "Sally loved you till the end. I did not tell her about my finding you. She deserved better than you and what you ever offered. I hope however that you will be able to find some purpose to your life and try to make amends. Your Son, Daniel."

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