If Ethan is ever old enough to understand this, tell him the truth.
I stopped reading.
I couldn’t.
Ethan gently touched my arm.
“Mom.”
“I can’t.”
“You have to.”
I looked at him.
He wasn’t asking me as a child anymore.
He was asking me as a grown man.
As someone who had spent years trying to understand the pieces of his own story.
So I continued.
The letter explained everything.
The red dress had belonged to my brother-in-law.
Not because he wore it.
Not because it was meant as some strange joke.
He had bought it for a little girl he believed might one day be born into our family.
But the dress had become something else after the accident.
A symbol.
A reminder.
A promise.
And the person standing beside me had been there when that promise was made.
She had been my brother-in-law’s closest friend.
The person he had loved.
The person who had known his dreams.
And the person who had promised him that if he died, she would make sure his message reached the child he would never meet.
But there was more.
Something I had never told anyone.
Before Ethan was born, I had been terrified.
Terrified that I wouldn’t be a good mother.
Terrified that I wouldn’t know how to raise a child without the man who had been like a brother to me.
And one night, after the accident, I had written a letter to my unborn child.
I had written about his uncle.
About the red dress.
About courage.
About the promise.
Then I had hidden the letter.
I never meant for Ethan to see it.
I thought I was protecting him.
Instead, I had accidentally buried the truth for seventeen years.
Ethan looked at me.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
I couldn’t look at him.
“Because I was scared.”
“Of what?”
“That you’d think I loved him more than I loved you.”
Ethan’s expression broke.
“Mom…”
“I lost him,” I whispered. “And then I had you. You were the one thing that kept me alive. I couldn’t bear the thought of turning you into a reminder of someone we’d lost.”
