But if you do, I need you to know that I didn’t leave.
I would have stayed every single day if I’d been allowed.
Wherever you are tonight, I’m thinking of you.
I always am.
Love, Mom.”
It was the first time I’d ever seen her call herself that.
I sat at my kitchen table at one in the morning with the letter in my hands.
I wondered what that sixteen-year-old version of me would have felt if he’d known his mother was somewhere thinking about him.
The next day, I called Anna and read the letter back to her.
She was quiet.
“I’d forgotten I wrote that one,” she said.
“I hadn’t,” I replied. “I never got to read it before. But I won’t forget it now.”
Her return finally answered the question I’d carried since I was thirteen.
She hadn’t disappeared because she stopped loving me.
She disappeared because someone had taken the choice away from her.
Part 8
Three months later, Anna came to my house for dinner.
I didn’t want some perfect movie-style reunion where one hug erased twelve years of pain.
We weren’t there yet.
