For Their Father
Claire picked up the envelope.
“Dad?”
Sophie was already watching my face. She had always been the one who read me first.
“No,” she said quietly. “No, no, no.”
Emma looked from her sister to me. “Is this from her?”
I couldn’t make my voice work, so I just nodded.
Sophie pushed her box away so hard it nearly slid off the table.
“Throw them out. All of them. I don’t want anything she touched.”
But Claire had turned the envelope over, and she went very still.
“It’s not for us,” she said.
Beneath READ FIRST, in smaller letters, Vanessa had written: For their father.
I took the envelope into the kitchen and shut the door behind me. Through the window I could see my daughters standing by the picnic table, three silhouettes against the fairy lights, not one of them moving.
I expected an apology. Or a request to see the girls. Or some carefully worded excuse I could tear apart.
