For illustration purposes only
Chloe did something completely unexpected with her portion of the money. She purchased three elegant wooden frames. Inside each frame, she carefully mounted one of Evelyn’s earliest bank deposit receipts directly beside a copy of our absolute favorite family photograph showing me smiling alongside the three girls as teenagers. She presented one framed picture to each of her sisters as a gift.
Abigail stared at her framed picture with a confused expression. “Why on earth would I want to hang this on my wall, Chloe?”
Chloe pointed directly at the faded bank receipt on the left side. “Because that paper represents what she gave us.” Then she shifted her finger to point at the happy family photograph on the right side. “And that picture represents the man who actually raised us.”
Abigail looked at the two items side by side for a long time without saying a word before walking over to her bookshelf and placing the frame prominently on the top shelf.
On the exact one-year anniversary of Evelyn’s death, Harper asked me a quiet question as we sat on the back porch, wondering if I still harbored deep hatred for her mother.
I sat back and thought carefully about the handwritten note left on the refrigerator magnet, the forged rejection letter written by Brandon, the two hundred and fifty-two monthly bank deposits, and the twenty-one unsent birthday letters. I thought about a deeply conflicted woman sitting in a parked car six houses down from her own children, completely frozen by her own fear of stepping up to knock on the front door.
“No, I do not hate her anymore,” I told Harper, and I truly meant every word of it.
Holding onto intense hatred for Evelyn had been immensely useful to me once upon a time. It was the fierce fire that fueled me through late-night baby feedings at two in the morning, overdue bills piling up on the table, and attending emotional school concerts with an empty seat beside me. But my
