“Six months into the pregnancy. Richard drove to the diner where I worked. He sat in a booth.”
I made myself keep going.
“He told me Kalen had signed a paper. A legal document. Relinquishing all rights to you in exchange for Richard paying his tuition abroad. He told me your father had chosen a university over you. And he handed me a copy, so I’d stop trying to reach out.”
Gabriella’s hand went to her mouth.
“Relinquishing all rights.”
Kalen said nothing. His face had gone the color of paper.
“I never showed it to you, Gabriella. I never wanted you to hold that in your hands. I thought it was better if you thought it was complicated.”
“You have it?” my daughter whispered. “You still have it?”
I stood up and walked out of the room, despite feeling unsteady.
“I never showed it to you.”
I walked to the hallway closet, moved the winter coats aside, and pulled down the small metal lockbox from the top shelf where it had lived for years. I carried it back into the living room and set it on the coffee table between us.
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Kalen finally spoke.
“Mara. Please. You don’t have to do this.”
“I do, actually.”
I unlocked it.
“You don’t have to do this.”
The key had been on my keychain the entire time, small and gold. Gabriella had asked about it once when she was nine, and I’d told her it opened nothing important.
I lifted the paper out. It was folded into thirds, exactly the way Richard had folded it before he slid it across that diner table.
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Gabriella took it from my hands.
Gabriella had asked about it once.
My eyes caught the envelopes still fanned across Kalen’s knee. There were no Swiss postmarks, no forwarding stamps, nothing to suggest they’d ever traveled farther than Richard’s house a few states over.
The flaps were still clean, as if the letters had been collected before they ever reached a mailbox.
Kalen had said he’d discovered them in his father’s storage unit only last month, after Richard died. Maybe that was true. But looking at them now, and his sudden appearance on Gabriella’s graduation night, I felt the first flicker of something I couldn’t quite name.
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There were no Swiss postmarks.
My ex-boyfriend hadn’t come simply because he’d finally found my letters. He had found them at exactly the moment he needed a reason for Gabriella to believe that he’d spent 18 years wanting to find her.
My daughter read in silence. Her lips moved a little on the second paragraph.
Devon put his hand on her back and left it there.
My daughter read in silence.
