Chapter 5: The Letter in Daylight
We found a quiet corner of the courtyard away from the main flow of families. Ava carefully removed the old letter from the inner pocket of her gown and placed it in my hands. The paper was creased and slightly yellowed at the edges. Eli’s handwriting was the same as the gas-receipt note I had locked away twenty-two years earlier, only older and more deliberate. I read the words again in daylight—the admission of watching from the stairwell, the two later visits outside the hardware store, the box mailed with instructions to wait until the girls were adults. He had seen me keep them. He had known I stayed. He had never knocked.
Claire watched my face while I read. “We found the box in the storage unit you gave us keys to last summer,” she said. “The one with the winter clothes and the old tax papers. It was labeled with our birth dates and the word ‘wait.’ We almost didn’t open it. Then we did. And once we read the letter we knew we were going to use part of today for this.”
June added, “We didn’t tell you because you would have said it wasn’t necessary. It was necessary for us.”
