Several pages slid into my lap.
She shook her head. "You read it, beta. Then call me."
My name was on the envelope in his blunt handwriting.
My hands shook as I opened it.
Several pages slid into my lap.
The first line said: "Hannah, I've been lying to you your whole life. I can't take this with me."
He wrote about the night of the crash. Not the version I knew.
My chest tightened.
He wrote about the night of the crash. Not the version I knew. He said my parents brought my overnight bag. Told him they were moving, "fresh start," new city.
"They said they weren't taking you," he wrote. "Said you'd be better off with me because they were a mess. I lost it."
He wrote what he'd screamed. That my dad was a coward. That my mom was selfish.
That they were abandoning me.
"You know the rest."
"I knew your dad had been drinking," he wrote. "I saw the bottle. I could've taken his keys. Called a cab. Told them to sleep it off. I didn't. I let them drive away angry because I wanted to win."
Twenty minutes later, the cops called.
"You know the rest," he wrote. "Car wrapped around a pole. They were gone. You weren't."
My hands trembled.
He explained why he hadn't told me.
"At first, when I saw you in that bed, I looked at you and saw punishment," he wrote. "For my pride. For my temper. I'm ashamed, but you need the truth: sometimes, in the beginning, I resented you. Not for anything you did. Because you were proof of what my anger cost."
Tears blurred the words.
"You were innocent. The only thing you ever did was survive. Taking you home was the only right choice I had left. Everything after that was me trying to pay a debt I can't pay."
He explained why he hadn't told me.
