The first line said:
“If anything happens to me, don’t let her blame Evelyn.”
I sat there on the attic floor rereading it over and over.
Dad wrote that his brakes had been failing for weeks. He kept putting off repairs because money was tight after the adoption paperwork and hospital bills from my asthma.
Then came the part that made my stomach turn.
He wrote that the night before he died, he overheard Evelyn on the phone crying to her sister because she’d found out he secretly borrowed against the house just to keep custody of me after his diagnosis got worse.
Diagnosis.
Nobody ever told me he was sick.
At the bottom of the letter was a folded medical report dated two months before the crash. Terminal pancreatic cancer.
Suddenly everything about my childhood shifted sideways.
Evelyn didn’t remarry fast because she stopped loving him.
She remarried because Dad made her promise not to spend the rest of her life drowning in grief while raising his kid alone.
Then I noticed one more sentence squeezed into the margin.
“She chose you before she chose me.”