Paige lifted her glass and began a toast.
She spoke about the father who had chosen them before he knew what he was doing, who learned everything as he went, and who had never once allowed them to believe they were a burden.
I cried before she finished.
Then Holly looked toward Elodie.
“There is someone else here tonight we need to talk about.”
The room became quiet.
Brooke held an old envelope in her hand.
“We found our biological mother three months ago,” she explained. “We didn’t tell Dad because we needed to understand what happened before we brought it into his life.”
I stared at them.
Paige silently asked me to trust them.
Brooke unfolded a copy of an old letter.
It had been written four months after their birth.
Elodie had addressed it to me.
In it, she admitted that leaving the hospital had been exactly as cruel as it looked. She had panicked. Curtis convinced her that three children would destroy their future, and she had wanted to believe him because she was terrified.
Four months later, Curtis left her.
That was when Elodie tried to come home.
She wrote that she knew she didn’t deserve forgiveness, but she wanted to see the girls and was willing to follow whatever rules I set.
I looked at her.
“You wrote this?”
“Yes.”
“I never received it.”
“I know that now.”
Elodie had mailed the letter to Aunt Lorraine’s house.
That address didn’t surprise me. For years after our parents left, nearly every important document connected to Elodie and me had listed Lorraine’s home. Even after I moved, some older records still used it.
Elodie wrote again on the girls’ first birthday.
Then at Christmas.
She sent cards for their second birthday and their third.
Some letters came back marked RETURN TO SENDER.
Others never returned at all.
The girls had seen copies Elodie kept.
But the handwriting across several returned envelopes wasn’t postal.
It belonged to someone in our family.
