My mother began to cry.
“I know.”
“No, you don’t. Because you had twenty years to decide what to do with your secret. I had three months to plan a wedding with a man who was lying to me.”
Daniel approached me.
“Claire, I know I’ve destroyed your trust. But please believe me when I say that my feelings for you were real.”
I stepped away.
“Your feelings might have been real. Your honesty wasn’t.”
He stopped.
Then my mother said the words that frightened me most.
“There’s one more thing.”
I looked at her in disbelief.
“How many secrets can there possibly be?”
She rose from the bed, tightened her robe, and walked toward an old wooden cabinet near the window.
From the bottom drawer, she removed a small envelope.
It was yellowed with age, its edges softened by years of being handled.
“I kept this after your father died,” she said. “I should have destroyed it, but I couldn’t.”
