He swallowed. “She says some letters were hidden. Some were thrown out, and some…” He glanced at the phone. “Some were kept in an attic box.”
“No, there’s no way.”
A box: real proof. I needed to see it.
I stared at him, then at the screen. “I spent eighteen years thinking he ran.”
Just then, my mother came through the back door carrying dinner rolls.
“I brought the good ones,” she called. Then she stopped. “Heather? What happened?”
I turned to her, still holding Leo’s phone.
“He wrote.”
She frowned. “Who?”
“Andrew.”
My father appeared behind her. “What’s going on?”
“Heather? What happened?”
I handed Mom the phone. She read the message thread while Dad read over her shoulder.
Mom’s face changed first. “Ted,” she whispered. “He wrote to her.”
Dad swore under his breath.
Leo looked between us. “You didn’t know?”
“If I’d known that Andrew wanted to be involved,” my father snapped, “I’d have gone to that house myself.”
“Ted,” Mom said.
“He wrote to her.”
“No, Lucy. That woman let our daughter think she was abandoned.”
His voice cracked on the last word, and that was what finally broke me.
It was my father almost crying in my kitchen because someone had stolen years from me and from Leo.
My son crossed the room and put his arms around me.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I didn’t know it was going to be like this.”
I pulled back and grabbed his face. “Don’t apologize for telling me the truth, honey. I need you to know that I’m not mad at you.”
His voice cracked on the last word.
