But they did prove that our family had lost years because people kept deciding what others should be allowed to know.
Lorraine had decided I shouldn’t receive the letters.
Elodie had later decided rejection was safer than showing up.
And I had spent twenty years believing silence told me the whole truth.
I didn’t want another decision made in silence.
So I pulled out a chair.
Twenty-four years earlier, a frightened little girl had clung to my shirt and asked me not to leave her.
She had grown into a woman who broke that promise in the worst possible way when she abandoned her own daughters.
I couldn’t undo that.
I couldn’t promise forgiveness either.
But as Elodie unfolded the birthday card and began reading the words she’d written twenty years earlier, I sat beside my daughters and listened.
For that morning, staying was enough.
