Chapter 10: The Letter

I drove straight to my father's house with Lydia's phone in my pocket, still buzzing.

Miles stayed behind at the clinic to talk to the doctor.

My father was in the workshop out back, planing a long board of cherry, with sawdust in his beard and the radio low.

He looked at my face and turned the plane off.

"What happened?"

"Where's the envelope?"

He did not ask which one.

He wiped his hands on his apron and walked into the kitchen ahead of me.

He opened the drawer where he kept the two photographs.

The cream envelope lay on top of them, worn soft at the edges.

He held it out.

"I never opened it," he said.

I sat down at the table where I had been told, at four years old, that my mother had gone on a trip.

My name was written on the front in thin, slanted handwriting.

I tore the flap.

There were three pages, covered on both sides.

I read the first lines, and my hands began to shake.

"Clara. If you are reading this, I'm already gone, or I'm in a room at the Harbor Inn pretending to be braver than I am."

"I left your father in a hurry and in shame. He was a good man and I was not a good wife."

"I met a man in the autumn before you turned three. I will not make it sound better than it was."

"By the time I understood I was pregnant, your father knew the baby was not his."

I stopped.

My father sat across from me with his hands flat on the table.

He said nothing.

I went on.

"He told me to go. He did not shout."

"He said I could take the baby, because she was not his to keep."

"But he would not give up his daughter, and I understood that he was right."

"You were four. You were the best thing I had ever done."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Kept Me Secret Seven Years, Then Proposed to Her from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.