Harper nodded slowly. “And she still chose not to come back to see us.”
Chloe looked at the massive stack of unsent birthday letters. “Why would she do that to us?”
There was one final legal document resting at the very bottom of the safe-deposit box with the girls’ full names written across the top header. Harper read the formal explanation aloud for everyone.
“Brandon eventually confessed that he forged Lucas’s signature because he was terrified I would abandon him to return home,” Evelyn had written. “He needed me to believe there was nothing left for me back there.”
For years, Brandon’s elaborate lie had kept her away, but once Evelyn discovered his betrayal, every single year that followed was entirely her own personal choice. She had formally left Brandon less than two years after abandoning us upon discovering that he had been cheating on her with another woman.
By the time she learned the truth about my forged letter, her deep personal shame had accomplished what Brandon’s lies no longer could. Shame had kept her hidden in the shadows. The monthly money was not proof that she had secretly supported us from afar, because she had not helped us survive a single hardship. The money was simply proof of something much smaller: she had remembered her children every single month, but she had chosen to make a cold bank deposit instead of making a simple phone call.
“Can we read these birthday letters now?” Chloe asked quietly, lifting the heavy stack.
“They belong to you girls, so you can do whatever you want with them,” I replied gently.
The very first letter was written for their first birthday, where Evelyn described buying three colorful cards at a local shop but feeling too ashamed to mail them. The letter for their fifth birthday described how she had spotted a set of triplets playing in a grocery store aisle and spent an hour crying hysterically in her parked car afterward. The letter for their tenth birthday mentioned that she had searched their school website and found a small digital photograph of Abigail proudly holding a science fair trophy.
Abigail stopped reading her letter abruptly. “She was watching us from afar the whole time?”
Harper opened another envelope from the pile. On their twelfth birthday, Evelyn wrote that she had finally uncovered Brandon’s deception and hired a private investigator to locate our current residential address. She knew where we lived, where the girls attended middle school, and that I had chosen to remain single all those years.
