For ten years, I raised my grandson believing his father had simply walked away.
I never knew his name. I never knew where he lived. And, most painfully, I never knew whether my daughter had been abandoned by the person she loved or whether there was something else she had been too afraid to tell me.
Then, one afternoon, a woman I had never seen before appeared beside my daughter’s grave.
She was holding a sealed envelope.
My name was written across the front.
In my daughter’s handwriting.
I forgot how to breathe.
“I made your daughter a promise,” the woman said quietly. “Now it’s time you knew the truth.”
Teagan had been gone for ten years.
Yet suddenly, it felt as though she had found a way to speak to me again.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
“She gave it to me.”
“When?”
“The day her baby was born.”
My fingers tightened around the flowers I was holding.
“You’ve had a letter from my daughter for ten years?”
The woman lowered her eyes.
“Yes.”
Before I could ask another question, I heard Lucas shouting from the bottom of the hill.
“Grandma! I found it!”
My grandson came running toward us from the car, waving the birthday card he had made for his mother.
The woman immediately looked toward him.
“Don’t open this in front of him.”
I stared at her.
“Who are you?”
“My name is Trudy.”
“That tells me nothing.”
“I knew Teagan at the hospital. I was her nurse.”
My stomach tightened.
Lucas was getting closer.
Trudy pushed the envelope firmly into my hand.
“My number is on the back.”
Then she walked away.
I stood beside my daughter’s grave, holding a letter she had written ten years earlier.
For the first time in a decade, I wondered whether I had been mourning a story that was never completely true.
