Chapter 3: My Mother's Voice on Paper
I didn't pick up the letter right away.
I stood at the kitchen table looking at my own name in my mother's handwriting, and I felt something I hadn't felt since the day she died — the specific, physical ache of wanting her in the room.
Michael hadn't moved from the floor.
"How long have you had this?" I asked.
"Since the week before she passed."
"She gave it to you herself?"
"She drove to my office." He pressed the back of his hand against his mouth for a moment.
"She said she needed to give it to someone who would know when the right time was."
"And when was the right time supposed to be, Michael?"
He didn't answer.
I picked up the letter.
The paper was heavier than I expected.
Cream-colored, folded in thirds, sealed with a small piece of tape that had long since gone dry at the edges.
My name was written in the careful, slightly slanted cursive she used when something mattered to her.
The same handwriting that had signed birthday cards, grocery lists, the note she left on my pillow the morning I got married.
I peeled back the tape.
My hands were steady.
I don't know how.
*My darling girl,*
*If you're reading this, then Michael decided the time had come.
I asked him to wait until he felt you were ready.
I hope he was right.*
*I need to tell you something I should have told you years ago.
I was afraid.
That's the only honest explanation I have.
I was afraid of what it would do to you, and I was afraid of what it would do to me to say it out loud.*
*You were not my only pregnancy.*
I stopped reading.
"Michael."
He looked up.
"She had other pregnancies."
"Yes."
"Before me?"
He nodded slowly.
"And after."
I sat down in the chair across from him.
The letter was still open in my hands.
"How many?"
"Keep reading," he said quietly.
"She explains it better than I can."
I looked back at the page.
*Before you were born, I lost three pregnancies.
Your father and I never spoke about it — not really.
That was a different time.
You didn't talk about those things.
You buried them and you kept going.*
*After you were born, I thought that part of my life was behind me.
But when you were four years old, I became pregnant again.
I didn't tell your father.
I was so frightened of losing another one that I kept it to myself, just for a little while, just until I was sure.*
*I wasn't sure in time.*
*I lost that baby at nineteen weeks.*
*I never told anyone.
Not your father.
Not a single friend.
I went to my appointments alone and I came home and I made dinner and I helped you with your homework and I did not say one word.*
*I did that four more times.*
I set the letter down on the table.
The kitchen was completely quiet.
"She went through this alone," I said.
"All of it.
Alone."
Michael's voice was rough.
"She didn't want to worry anyone."
"She didn't want to worry anyone." I heard how flat my voice sounded.
"She lost eight pregnancies and she didn't want to worry anyone."
"She was from a different generation—"
"I know what generation she was from." I picked the letter back up.
"I know exactly what generation she was from.
I watched her hold me together through every single one of our losses and she never once said, *I know how this feels.* Not once."
My throat closed.
"She knew," I said.
"She knew exactly how it felt and she never told me."
Michael got up from the floor then.
He didn't come toward me.
He just stood at the edge of the kitchen, giving me space, which was the right thing to do and somehow made it worse.
I turned back to the letter.
There was still more.
*The ultrasounds were all I kept.
I don't know why.
Maybe because they were proof that those pregnancies were real, that those babies existed, even briefly.
I kept them in a box for years.
When you and Michael built your house, I asked if I could hide them somewhere safe — somewhere they wouldn't be thrown away by accident, somewhere they would outlast me.*
*Michael found a place.*
*I made him promise never to show them to you unless he felt the moment was right.
I was afraid the photographs would only cause you pain.
But I was also afraid that if I took them with me when I died, those babies would disappear completely.*
*I couldn't let them disappear.*
I folded the letter.
Set it on the table.
Put both hands flat on the surface and looked at the twelve ultrasound photographs spread between us.
Eight of them were hers.
I hadn't known.
Fourteen years of my own grief, and my mother had been sitting across from me at this same table, carrying hers in silence, and I had never once known.
"There's more to the letter," Michael said carefully.
I looked at him.
"I know," I said.
"Give me a minute."
He nodded.
He sat down across from me.
He didn't speak.
Outside, the neighbor's dog barked twice and went quiet.
I reached for the letter again — and that was when I noticed the second folded page tucked behind the first.
A page I hadn't seen.
Different paper.
Slightly yellowed.
I opened it.
May you like
At the top, in my mother's handwriting, were four words that made the room tilt all over again.
*There is one more.*
