Chapter 3: What the Letter Said
I set the letter down on the table.
Not because I'd finished reading it.
Because my eyes had stopped working properly somewhere around the third paragraph.
"Dad." Leo's hand landed on my arm.
"Do you want me to read it out loud?"
"No." I picked it up again.
"No.
I've got it."
The second paragraph began where the first one had left off — not with an apology, not with an excuse, but with a date.
The date of her diagnosis.
Four days before Leo was born.
*Stage three.
That's what they told me.
The oncologist used the word aggressive.
He said treatment could begin immediately but that the outcome was uncertain.
He said I had maybe two years, possibly less, possibly more, but that I should make arrangements.*
I read that sentence twice.
*Make arrangements.*
"She found out before he was born?" I looked at Mrs.
Johnson.
"Four days before." She folded her hands around her teacup.
"She came to me the night after the appointment.
She sat right where you're sitting now.
She didn't cry.
She just said, 'Eleanor, I need to think out loud and I need someone who won't try to fix it.'"
"Why didn't she come to me?"
Mrs.
Johnson looked at me steadily.
"Because you would have tried to fix it."
I opened my mouth.
Closed it.
She wasn't wrong.
I kept reading.
*I watched you with Leo those first two days in the hospital.
The way you held him.
The way you talked to him like he already understood every word.
I knew then that you were going to be extraordinary for him.
And I knew that if I stayed, you would spend every ounce of that on me instead.
On doctors and appointments and hope that was running out.
Leo needed all of you, Arthur.
Not the half that was left after grief.*
My throat tightened so hard it hurt.
"She thought she was protecting us," I said.
It wasn't a question.
"She was protecting you," Leo said quietly.
"Both of us."
I looked at my son.
Eighteen years old.
Calm in a way I had never fully understood until this moment — that particular steadiness of his, the way he absorbed hard things without shattering.
I had always thought it was simply who he was.
Now I wondered how much of it he had learned from knowing something I didn't.
"How long have you known?" I asked him.
He glanced at Mrs.
Johnson.
"Since I was fifteen," he said.
"She told me herself."
The floor shifted under me.
"She told you.
She told a fifteen-year-old boy.
And neither of you—"
"She asked me to wait," Leo said.
"She said you needed to hear it when I was old enough that you could be angry without worrying about me."
I stood up from the table.
Walked to the window.
The street outside was dark and quiet, the same street it had always been, the same houses, the same amber glow from the lamp on the corner.
Three streets away.
She had been three streets away.
"Is she still sick?" My voice came out flat.
I didn't recognize it.
Mrs.
Johnson was quiet for a moment too long.
"Eleanor." I turned around.
"Is she still sick?"
"She's been in remission for four years," she said carefully.
"But Arthur — the treatment changed things.
It was very hard on her.
She isn't the same as she was."
I grabbed my jacket off the back of the chair.
"What are you doing?" Leo asked.
"I'm going to find her."
Leo stood up so fast his chair scraped back.
"Dad.
It's nine o'clock at night."
"I know what time it is."
"She doesn't know you know yet." Mrs.
Johnson's voice was sharp enough to stop me at the door.
"Arthur.
She doesn't know I gave you the letter tonight.
She thought — she asked me to give it to Leo.
She didn't know he would give it to you."
I turned around slowly.
"She didn't want me to read it?"
Mrs.
Johnson set her teacup down.
The rattle of it against the saucer was the only sound in the room.
May you like
"She wanted Leo to know the truth.
She wasn't sure she wanted you to."
