My mother’s letter was short. She wrote that she had opened a small savings account in my name, and that she had asked my father to give me this letter on my eighteenth birthday. She also begged me to forgive him someday, because she knew grief would turn him hard and cold. My father never delivered it. According to Paige, he hid it in his old toolbox because reading it broke him every time.

Paige’s letter explained the rest. After Mom died, Russell drank heavily for years. That July, Aunt Marlene told him she would report his drinking if he kept tearing me down. He picked me up furious, and the dirt road was his cruel way of proving he was in charge. He drove home, sat in the driveway, and wept, then turned around an hour later. By then I had already started walking, and he searched the roads until dark. When Marlene called to say I was safe, shame stopped him from ever dialing back.

He signed the custody papers believing I would be better off. Years later he quit drinking and sent Marlene a check every month, though he never wrote a word with it. I called her that night with my voice shaking, and she admitted everything. She had deposited every check into an account for me, forty-eight thousand dollars in total, and promised him she would let me decide when to know. I was angry for one full night, then I understood she had simply waited until I was ready.

Russell died in September, and Paige found both letters in his toolbox, along with a note that said, “I was wrong, and I never stopped looking for him.” I drove to the wedding in December, and Paige met me at the door in her gown. She cried, and I held her for a long time. I did not forgive my father in a day, but I visited his grave and finally read my mother’s words aloud. I used part of the money to help Paige with her first home, and Aunt Marlene sat beside me at the reception.