That night after everyone went home I sat by the half-decorated tree with a butter knife and turned Arthurs old chipped glass star upside down, and pried open the little metal base, and folded inside so tight it had gone soft as cloth was a piece of paper, and a photograph, and a thin gold band.
The photograph was of a baby. And the ring was sized for a woman, but it was not mine, and the paper was a birth record from 1976, a year before Arthur married me at that five and dime Christmas in Wichita.
My careful orderly husband, who color-coded the spice rack, had hidden this inside a Christmas star for forty-seven years, brought it down off the top of the tree every January and put it away with his own hands so no one else would touch it, and I never once knew the star had a secret inside its base.
The thing Arthur needed me to forgive him for was not another woman, it was a daughter, a baby girl he had with his first love before me, a girl her mother took away when she left, and whom Arthur searched for quietly and hopelessly every year of our marriage.
The letter, when I unfolded it, told the whole of it. Her name was Grace. Her mother left Wichita in 1976 and cut Arthur out completely, and he never saw the baby again, and he married me the next Christmas still carrying the hole of her. He put her birth record and her mothers ring in the star because the star went up every Christmas, and Christmas was when he ached for Grace the most, and this way he could hold her once a year with no one the wiser.
He wrote that he had finally found her, in 2021, a grown woman of forty-five in Colorado, and that he had been too afraid and too ashamed to tell me after keeping it so long. He had written to Grace but never mailed it. The letter was in the star too, addressed, stamped, never sent, a father who ran out of Christmases before he found his courage.
I mailed Arthurs letter to Grace myself, that January, with a note of my own. She called me on a snowy afternoon, her voice shaking, saying she had wondered her whole life if her father ever thought of her. I told her he thought of her every single Christmas for forty-seven years, at the top of the tree. She came for Christmas this year. She put the old glass star up top herself, with her own daughter lifted up to help. Forgive him for waiting so long, he said. I did, the moment I understood he had not been hiding a sin all those years. He had been keeping a candle lit for a lost child, in the one place in our home that only shone in December.