Chapter 4: The Sister I Never Answered
Her name was Carol Voss.
I hadn't heard that name spoken out loud in nearly twenty-eight years, and hearing it now in my son's living room felt like a door opening onto a room I had sealed and plastered over and painted and told myself no longer existed.
"How many letters were there?" I asked.
"Three," Tina said.
"All from her.
All within the first two years after Robert d*ed."
"Did you read all three?"
"The first two." She set the phone on the coffee table between us, screen up this time.
"The third one was still sealed."
I looked at the image on the screen.
A photograph of an envelope, yellowed at the edges, my name and old address written in a hand I recognized immediately.
Neat, slightly left-leaning.
Carol had always written like that.
"You kept a sealed letter for thirty years," Daniel said.
It wasn't quite an accusation.
It was something worse — genuine confusion.
"I couldn't open it," I said.
"When it arrived, I was barely holding together.
Robert had been gone for eight months.
You were five months old.
I was living in a one-bedroom apartment and working double shifts and your father — my husband — we weren't married yet, we were still figuring out what we were to each other." I stopped.
"I told myself I would open it when I was stronger."
"And then?"
"And then I moved.
And I brought the box.
And every time I came across it, the moment still didn't feel right." I looked at the image of the envelope.
"And eventually I stopped believing I was ever going to be strong enough."
Daniel sat back down.
He rested his elbows on his knees and looked at the floor for a moment.
"What did the first two letters say?" I asked Tina.
She glanced at Daniel.
He gave a small nod.
"The first one was written about two months after Robert d*ed," Tina said.
"She said she knew about you.
That Robert had told her he was going to ask you to marry him.
She said she wanted to meet you — that you were the last real connection she had to him." Tina paused.
"She said she didn't have anyone else.
Their parents were already gone.
Robert was her only family."
My throat tightened.
"The second letter came about a year later," Tina continued.
"She said she'd heard through someone — she didn't say who — that you'd had a baby.
She said she wasn't trying to cause any trouble.
She just wanted to know if the baby was Robert's.
She said if it was, she would like to know she had a nephew or niece somewhere in the world.
That was all she was asking."
The room was very quiet.
"I never wrote back," I said.
"I know," said Tina.
Daniel raised his eyes.
"Why?"
"Because I was afraid." I said it plainly, without dressing it up.
"I was afraid that if I let her in, everything would unravel.
Your father — my husband — had agreed to raise you as his own, and we were building something fragile and real, and I was terrified that contact with Robert's family would threaten that.
That it would confuse you.
That it would hurt the man who was choosing to be your father." I looked at my son.
"I made a decision to protect our family.
And I have never fully forgiven myself for what that decision cost Carol."
Daniel was quiet for a long moment.
"She might still be alive," Tina said softly.
I looked at her.
"She'd be in her mid-sixties now, maybe," Tina continued.
"If she's still—" She stopped herself.
"I looked her up.
After we found the letters.
I couldn't help it."
My heart was beating very fast.
"And?"
Tina reached for her phone.
She turned it toward me.
A Facebook profile.
A woman with silver hair and Robert's eyes — unmistakably Robert's eyes — standing in front of what looked like a garden somewhere in the Pacific Northwest.
Smiling at the camera.
Carol Voss.
Still alive.
Still using her name.
"She posted three days ago," Tina said.
I pressed my fingers to my mouth.
Daniel stood up again.
He walked to the window a second time, but this time he didn't turn his back to me.
He stood sideways, looking at the street, one hand on the frame.
"She has a right to know about me," he said.
It wasn't a question.
"Yes," I said.
"She does."
"And I have a right to know about her."
"Yes."
He turned then.
His face had shifted — the grief was still there, but something else had moved in alongside it.
Something that looked, cautiously, like the beginning of a decision.
"I want to open the third letter," he said.
I nodded once.
"Together," he said.
"I want to open it with you."
Tina was already moving toward the hallway.
She came back thirty seconds later with a small wooden box — the kind with a brass latch.
She set it on the coffee table and lifted the lid.
Inside, among a handful of photographs and folded papers, was the envelope.
Still sealed.
My name in Carol's neat left-leaning hand.
Daniel sat beside me on the sofa.
Close enough that his shoulder was against mine.
He hadn't sat that close to me since he was a teenager.
He picked up the envelope and held it out.
"You open it," he said.
"It was sent to you."
May you like
My hands were not steady.
But I took it.
