Her husband read me the first paragraph over the phone, and I knew immediately that something was wrong. The words sounded like me, but I had never written them, and the date made even less sense. He told me there were several pages, all signed with my name, and the final page contained something I had supposedly confessed about what happened after the wedding.
I asked him to read the next paragraph, and he stopped before finishing it. He said the letter mentioned a conversation I had never had and a decision I had never made, but there was one detail that only someone inside our family could have known. Then he told me where the envelope had been hidden, and I realized it hadn’t simply been forgotten in a box.
He sent me a photograph of the signature, and I stared at it for several minutes because it was close enough to mine to fool almost anyone. Then I noticed one tiny difference in the way the final letter was formed. I knew exactly who had copied my handwriting before, and when I remembered where I had seen that same mistake, I finally understood why my daughter had stopped speaking to me in 2019…
