PART 3 — THE SILVER FRAME
Danny brought the letter home that night, addressed to Christine Walsh, the name I buried when I was nineteen.
I held it for days before I could open it. When I did, it was an apology twenty years in the making.
I ran away at nineteen with a newborn and a forged birth certificate because my parents, strict and frightened and ashamed of an unwed daughter, had told me they would raise my baby as their own and that I would have no say. I believed the only way to keep my son was to vanish. So I became Christine Brennan, and I never let anyone find me.
But my parents had spent twenty years searching, not to take Danny, but to say they were sorry. The letter was my fathers. We were wrong, it said. We drove you away over our own pride, and we have missed every day of your life and his. If this ever reaches you, please let us know our grandson before it is too late.
I spent twenty years running from parents I thought wanted to take my child, when all along they only wanted to beg my forgiveness for making me run.
It was chance, or something more than chance, that put my son in the moving truck that carried my own parents to their last home. He wrapped their silver frame in bubble wrap and saw his own baby picture inside it, the one I never knew they had.
I drove to the retirement home the next morning. My mother and father, so old now, so small, held onto me and onto Danny and would not let go.
We did not get the twenty years back. But we have the ones that are left. Danny has grandparents now, and I have the parents I thought I had lost, and the frightened girl named Christine Walsh can finally stop running.