Then I remembered the envelope from Dad’s desk.
“What about the money?”
Anna looked confused.
“What money?”
“The cash you supposedly stole.”
Her face went still.
“I never touched your father’s money.”
I believed her immediately.
“If you’re really my mother,” I asked quietly, “why didn’t you ever try to reach me?”
“I did.”
“I wrote to you.”
“I know.”
“Every letter came back.”
“Mine didn’t.”
I looked at her.
“What?”
“I wrote to you for years.”
She told me she’d written constantly at first, then at least once every birthday.
“Your father must have kept them.”
“You sent them to our house?”
She nodded.
The same house where I’d spent my childhood.
The same mailbox I’d checked again and again, hoping for something from her.
“I stopped trusting the mail eventually,” she said. “But I never stopped writing.”
She had kept every letter.
“Then why didn’t you come for me?”
“I tried. But your father—or the new nanny—was always there. And I wasn’t allowed anywhere near your school.”
Eventually, I went away to college.
I changed my phone number.
I barely used social media.
Anna had no idea where I’d gone.
