PART 3 — THE LAST ENVELOPE
My father came through the door slowly, an old man now, and he saw the ammo box open on the table and the letters untied, and he sat down heavily and did not try to lie.
In 1994, he told me, James Turner had come to the farm to ask for my hand. My father, who had never thought a sailor was good enough for his daughter, told James a lie. He said I had already moved on, that I was engaged, that James should stop writing and let me go.
James believed him. The letters, two years of them, my father had taken from the mailbox before I ever saw them and hidden them under the floorboards of the hayloft.
James had not forgotten me. He had written every week for two years, and my own father had buried every word under the hay so I would marry the man he preferred.
I read the letter my father left to be opened after he was gone. He had written it years ago, unable to say the words to my face. I am a coward, it said. I stole your happiness and called it protection. Forgive me if you can.
I looked at the old man at my kitchen table. I did not scream. He had already spent thirty years being punished by his own conscience. I told him I would try to forgive him, in time.
Then I did the thing he had feared all along. With my son Jake sitting beside me, I opened the first of Jamess letters, and I read them all, every one, in order. And when I reached the end, I picked up the phone and began to look for the boy who never stopped writing.
I do not know yet what I will find. But for the first time in thirty years, I know the truth. He loved me. He wrote. And it was never his silence that kept us apart. It was a lie I am finally done living inside.