Despite myself, I smiled.
“I know you can.”
He looked at me.
“I handled it badly.”
“Yes.”
“I’m not asking you to pretend otherwise.”
That mattered.
We didn’t magically repair things.
We agreed to go slowly.
No grand declarations.
No pretending a year together guaranteed another.
Stephen came for pancakes one Saturday.
Lily interrogated him about planets.
He apologized for leaving dinner.
She accepted immediately and demanded he help construct a cardboard rocket.
Children sometimes understand forgiveness better than adults because they don’t confuse it with forgetting.
Three weeks after I mailed the letter, an envelope arrived.
Oregon postmark.
No return name.
My hands trembled before I opened it.
Inside were four pages.
The first line read:
Dear Anna, I have rewritten this letter more times than you can imagine.
I sat down.
Claire explained everything.
She had discovered the genetic report.
She had accused my mother.
My mother denied an affair.
