Then I stood up.
“Do you know what hurts?”
“Mom, please…”
“I’m not leaving you,” I said. “I just can’t hear another word tonight.”
I walked past him, went outside, and stood on the porch for a while.
***
Later, I came back in, found Noah gone, and went up to my room, but I didn’t sleep.
Sometime before dawn, I picked up my keys.
“I’m not leaving you.”
***
The cemetery was quiet at that hour, dew clinging to the grass.
I found Yolanda’s headstone beneath a small oak and sat beside it with the envelope in my lap.
The letter Mr. Frankson gave me also included details about where my sister was buried.
The attorney must have figured I’d want to pay my last respects at some point.
The cemetery was quiet.
I turned to the last page of the letter, the part I hadn’t finished the night before.
Yolanda’s handwriting shook across the paper.
She confessed that she’d started the fight that pushed us apart years ago. The cruel words about me wanting our mother to die had come from her mouth first, not mine.
She wrote that she’d carried that guilt ever since, terrified I’d die hating her.
She’d started the fight.
For all those years, I’d blamed myself for losing her.
The weight of it shifted right there on the grass above my sister.
“I was so angry, Yol,” I said out loud. “And so proud. I heard you were sick. I heard, and I still didn’t come. I told myself that door had been shut too long.”
I stayed until the sun cleared the trees.
“I was so angry.”
***
Noah was sitting on the porch steps when I pulled into the driveway.
He stood up quickly when he saw me, then sat back down as though his legs wouldn’t hold him.
***
I stopped at the bottom of the steps and really looked at him.
In that scared kid’s face, I saw the boy I’d raised and the nephew I’d never known, both at once.
I sat down beside him.
He stood up quickly.
“I’m not angry anymore, Noah.”
His shoulders began to shake.
“You are my nephew and my son. Both were true the day you came home. Nothing in that envelope changes it.”
“Mom, I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay, my baby. No more secrets. From today, no more.”
He nodded against my shoulder.
“I’m not angry anymore.”
The screen door creaked, and Mia stepped out in her robe.
She didn’t know what was happening, but she still sat down on my other side and wrapped her arms around both of us.
