I’m only asking you to see him clearly.
The way I eventually learned to.
He never once, in three years, asked me f
Everything he gave, he gave because he wanted to.
Everything you saw as strange or suspicious was simply a kind of devotion this family has forgotten how to recognize when it doesn’t come from blood.
Go find him.
He’s going to need someone tonight, and I don’t think it should be a stranger.
All my love, always.
Grandma.
I sat in that parking lot for almost twenty minutes before I could make myself drive anywhere.
Daniel wasn’t at the house when I got there.
I found him, eventually, at the small cemetery on the edge of town.
Sitting on the ground beside a grave that wasn’t Grandma’s yet.
My grandfather’s.
The man Daniel had never even met.
Whose death, fifteen years earlier, had somehow set this entire quiet chain of events into motion.
He looked up when he heard my footsteps.
His face braced, immediately, for whatever accusation he assumed I’d come to deliver.
I didn’t say anything at first.
I just sat down on the grass beside him.
The letter still folded in my coat pocket.
“She left me a letter,” I finally said.
His shoulders dropped, just slightly.
“I figured she might.”
