Chapter 3: What the Letter Said
I didn't open the envelope at the funeral.
I couldn't.
Not with my aunts circling, not with the pastor still shaking hands near the door, not with Connor standing three feet away watching my face like he already knew what was coming.
"Take your time," he said.
"But don't wait too long."
He handed me a card with his phone number, gave one slow nod, and walked back to his motorcycle alone.
I drove home with the envelope on the passenger seat.
I didn't touch it.
I made tea I didn't drink.
I sat at the kitchen table where Mom used to shell peas on Sunday afternoons and I stared at my own name in her handwriting until the room got dark.
Then I opened it.
The letter was three pages, front and back, written in her careful cursive.
The date at the top was eight months ago — two months before her diagnosis.
*My darling,*
*If you're reading this, then Connor kept his promise, and I am gone.
I'm sorry I couldn't tell you myself.
I tried, more than once.
But every time I sat down to say it, I thought about your father, and I lost my nerve.
He was a good man.
Please hold onto that.
What I'm about to tell you doesn't change that.*
*Before I met your father, I had another life.
I was nineteen years old and very foolish and very much in love with a boy named Thomas Eller.
We were going to get married.
And then I found out I was expecting.*
My hands went still on the page.
*Thomas's family sent him away before I could tell him.
His mother came to see me instead.
She sat in my mother's front room and she told me that Thomas had enlisted and that he wasn't coming back for me and that I should make other arrangements.
Those were her exact words.
Make other arrangements.*
*I was twenty years old.
I had no money and no family who could help.
So I did what she told me to do.*
*I gave the baby up.*
I set the letter down on the table.
I picked it up again.
*A boy.
I held him for eleven minutes.
I counted every one.
I named him Daniel, though I knew they wouldn't keep the name.
I don't know what name they gave him.
I don't know where he went.
For forty years I told myself it was better not to know.*
*Then, two years ago, a letter arrived at the house.
It was from a man named Robert.
He said he had reason to believe I might be his biological mother.
He said he wasn't looking for anything from me.
He just wanted to know if he was real.*
I stood up from the table.
I walked to the window.
Outside, the neighbor's porch light was on and a cat was crossing the lawn and the world looked completely ordinary.
I went back and kept reading.
*I wrote to him.
We exchanged letters for six months before I told Connor.
Connor was the only person I trusted not to tell your father, God rest him, and not to tell you before I was ready.
He drove me to meet Robert for the first time at a small café near the cemetery where Robert's adoptive parents are buried.
Robert visits them every week.
He's that kind of man.*
*I went back every week after that.
Not just to see Robert.
To sit with the people who raised my son and gave him a good life when I couldn't.
I owed them that much.*
*Robert doesn't know I'm ill.
I haven't told him.
I didn't want our time together to be about goodbye.*
*You have a brother, my darling.
His name is Robert Eller.
He is fifty-one years old.
He lives twenty minutes from your house and he has no idea you exist.*
*Please find him.
Please don't let him be alone in this.*
*All my love, always —*
*Mom*
I folded the letter.
I set it on the table.
May you like
I put both hands flat on the wood and I breathed.
Then I picked up Connor's card.
