Chapter 5: My Father's Letter
The letter was four pages, handwritten on the same cream stationery my father had used for everything — grocery lists, birthday cards, the note he left on my pillow the morning I left for college.
I would have known the paper anywhere.
I sat on the edge of the bare bed frame and read.
*William,*
*If you are reading this, then Diana kept her word.
That alone should tell you something about who she is.*
*I am going to tell you the truth.
All of it.
I should have told you years ago, but I was a coward about this one thing, and I am sorry for it.*
*Diana came to me twenty-two years ago.
She was nineteen years old and she had nowhere to go.
Her mother had passed the previous winter.
Her stepfather had taken everything — the house, the savings, every document with her name on it.
She came to me because I had been her mother's attorney.
She had no one else.*
*I could have referred her to a shelter.
I didn't.
I rented her the lower unit of this house for one dollar a year.
I told her she could stay as long as she needed.
I helped her get her records restored.
I helped her finish her degree.
I did not tell your mother because I knew how it would look, and I was wrong to hide it.
That is my shame to carry, not Diana's.*
*She lived here for four years.
She was the most honest person I have ever known.
When she left, she left the key on the kitchen counter with a note that said: Thank you for believing I was worth saving.*
*I kept the key.*
*I built the room because she asked me once — as a joke, I think, though maybe not entirely — whether there was a place in the world that was just hers.
That no one could take.
I built it for her.
I never told her I did.
I put the things she left behind inside it.
I don't know why.
I think I wanted there to be one place in this house that remembered her correctly.*
*Now I need to tell you the part that will be harder to read.*
*Diana is not a stranger who wandered into your life.
I introduced you.
Do you remember the charity dinner four years ago — the one you said you only attended because I insisted?
I asked Diana to be there.
I had been watching you both for years, separately, and I thought — I hoped — that if I put you in the same room, you might find each other.*
*I was right.
And I was wrong to engineer it the way I did.
You deserved to know the full story before you fell in love with her.*
*The reason I could not tell you is this: Diana was protecting a secret that was not mine to share.
It is hers.
Ask her.
She will tell you now.*
*I love you, son.
I am sorry it took a brass key and an old room to get us here.*
*— Dad*
I read it twice.
Then I sat with it in my hands for a long time.
The child's drawing on the wall.
Two figures.
One tall.
One small.
I looked at it differently now.
I folded the letter carefully, put it back in the envelope, and went upstairs.
Diana was sitting at the kitchen table.
A cup of tea in front of her, untouched.
Maya was not in the room.
I sat down across from her.
"He told me to ask you," I said.
"He said there's a secret that's yours.
That you'd tell me now."
Diana wrapped both hands around her cup.
"Yes," she said.
"I will."
She looked up at me.
Her eyes were steady, but the steadiness cost her something.
"Maya," she said.
"Is not just your daughter, William."
The kitchen was very quiet.
"What does that mean?" I said.
"It means," Diana said carefully, "that her mother — your ex-wife, Carla — came to me eight months before you and Carla separated.
She came to me because she had found out who I was.
Who I had been to your father.
She thought I was his mistress." A short, painful exhale.
"I wasn't.
But she didn't believe me.
And she told me something to hurt me.
She told me that Maya wasn't yours."
The room tilted.
"She was lying," Diana said quickly.
"I believe she was lying.
But William — I have carried that for three years not knowing whether to tell you, because I didn't know if it was true, and I didn't know what it would do to you if it was."
I stood up.
May you like
My chair scraped back hard against the floor.
"Where is Maya?" I said.
