“I should’ve fought harder to stay with you.”
Dorothy heard something I wasn’t saying.
She thought I was apologizing for abandoning her and our baby.
I was apologizing for letting our teenage relationship disappear.
“I can’t go through those months again,” she told me.
“We don’t have to.”
I held her hand.
“Can we start here?”
She said yes.
We married the following spring.
Years later, Nancy was born.
I placed her against Dorothy’s chest.
Our daughter’s fingers grabbed Dorothy’s hospital gown.
I remember Dorothy suddenly crying.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
I kissed her forehead.
“She knows her mom.”
I never knew those words had broken something open inside her.
Because she remembered another baby’s fingers wrapped around another hospital gown.
And still, she didn’t tell me.
That part mattered.
Her mother had created the first lie.
But Dorothy admitted she’d had opportunities to tell me afterward.
Before our wedding.
During her pregnancy with Nancy.
On countless quiet nights after our daughter fell asleep.
Each time, Dorothy imagined me asking why she’d waited so long.
So she waited longer.
Then her mother’s stroke sent her back into the house she’d spent years avoiding.
While looking through a drawer, she found paperwork.
And beneath it, a shoebox.
Inside were two bundles of letters.
The first bundle had Dorothy’s name written across the envelopes.
In my handwriting.
She opened one.
“Your mother said you don’t want me to contact you. Please tell me yourself. I thought we were happy.”
Another had been written three weeks later.
Another two months after that.
“Whatever happened, let me come see you. You don’t have to stay with me. Just let me know you’re okay.”
Dorothy sat on her mother’s bedroom floor reading every letter.
Not one mentioned a pregnancy.
Not one mentioned a baby.
Because I had never known.
The following morning, Dorothy took the letters to the hospital.
She placed them on her mother’s tray.
“You told me he knew I was pregnant.”
Her mother stared at the envelopes.
“Did you tell him?”
“No.”
Dorothy gripped the bed rail.
“You let me believe he didn’t want us.”
Her mother’s answer was simple.
“You would’ve gone back.”
Then Dorothy opened the second bundle.
Those letters were newer.
