⸻
Piper broke first, tears coming fast the second I asked.
“We should have given you this two years ago,” she said. “Mom sent it right after we turned eighteen.”
My chest went tight before I’d even seen what she was talking about.
Wren spoke next, quieter, barely above a whisper.
“We hid it because we were scared,” she said. “If you knew the truth, we thought — maybe you’d look at us differently. Maybe you wouldn’t want us the same way anymore.”
I genuinely didn’t understand what she meant. Not yet.
⸻
Nora finally reached into her bag and pulled out an old envelope, the paper gone soft at the corners from two years of handling, our mother’s handwriting across the front, shakier than I remembered it.
I opened it with hands that weren’t entirely steady.
The first line hit me before I’d even finished reading it once.
My dear son, I left because I learned what none of you were ever supposed to know.
I made myself keep reading, sitting at that same kitchen table where I’d made three girls a thousand meals over twenty years, my sisters watching me with an expression somewhere between dread and relief that the secret was finally, after two years, out of their hands.
