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I don’t have a good excuse for what I did with that information, Micah. I’ve spent twenty years trying to construct one, and none of them hold up under any real weight.
I was ashamed. Not of the girls — never of them, not for one single day — but of myself, and of what I’d have to face if the truth ever came out the way I was certain it eventually would. Your father’s friends. My own mother, still alive back then. The whole town, if I’m honest about how small that town really was.
I told myself the girls deserved a mother who wasn’t drowning in that kind of shame every time she looked at them. I told myself, somewhere in the middle of that terrible logic, that leaving was somehow the responsible thing to do, instead of admitting it was simply the easiest thing to do for me.
I want you to understand something clearly, because I think it’s the only part of this letter that actually matters. Those girls are not less yours because of anything in this letter. They never were. You raised them, Micah. Not me. Whatever blood says about who fathered them has nothing to do with who actually built a family out of the wreckage I left behind.
I hope, by the time you read this, you’ve already understood that on your own, without needing me to say it. I hope I’m not the one who finally taught you that lesson, twenty years too late to matter to anyone but myself.
I’m sorry. For all of it. For leaving, and for making you carry something that should have been mine to carry instead.
Mom
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I set the letter down on the table and looked at my sisters — twenty years old now, all three of them watching me with the exact same expression, waiting to see whether the truth in that envelope had actually changed anything between us.
