Chapter 7: What She Knew
I took the shoebox home with me that day.
For three days, I didn’t open any more letters. I just kept the box on the kitchen table and stared at it. On the fourth day, I finally forced myself to read them all.
She had written to me almost every week for three years.
Some letters were short — just a few lines about how I took my coffee or how I always left my shoes by the door in the same spot. Others were longer and more personal. She wrote about her first husband and how much she had loved him. She wrote about how lonely she had been before I came into her life. She wrote about how she had seen the exhaustion and hopelessness in my eyes the first time we met and had decided, right then, that she wanted to give me something no one else ever had.
Safety.
She never asked me to love her back.
She only asked me to let her love me.
In one letter, written about eight months into our marriage, she wrote:
I know you think you’re using me. But I’m using you too, in my own way. You make this big, quiet house feel less empty. So maybe we’re both getting something we need. Even if it’s not the same thing.
I had to put the letter down after that.
All this time, I had believed I was the one in control. I thought I was the one playing her.
But she had been the one taking care of me.
May you like
Quietly. Patiently. Without ever asking for anything in return.
And I had been too blind and too selfish to truly see it.
