…therapist.
Dr. Ellen Moore. I’d been seeing her every Tuesday for eleven years. I’d told her everything about my marriage. About my husband, Paul. About how lonely I’d felt in our forties. About the miscarriages. About how much I’d wanted a daughter.
The little girl in the photo was maybe nine. She had Paul’s dimples.
I sat down on the concrete floor of that storage unit, surrounded by a decade of birthday cards signed “Love, Daddy,” and I understood, slowly, what I was looking at. My husband had a daughter. With the woman I’d been paying to help me heal from not having one.
I called Paul’s best friend, Ray, from the parking lot. He drove over immediately. He sat with me in my car and told me what he knew.
Paul had met Ellen when he came to one of my sessions, years ago, for a couples appointment. A year later, they were seeing each other. Ellen got pregnant. Paul couldn’t bring himself to leave me, and he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the child. So he did both. He visited his daughter, Sophie, on Saturdays. He kept everything he couldn’t bring home in that storage unit. Every gift. Every drawing. He’d been planning, Ray said, to tell me “someday.”
“I told him a hundred times,” Ray said. “I told him it would destroy you to find out this way. He said he knew. He gave me that envelope two years ago.”
Ellen, I learned later, had kept seeing me for three more years after Sophie was born. Every Tuesday. Taking my money. Listening to me cry about wanting a daughter. Before she referred me to a colleague, “for a fresh perspective.”
I filed a complaint with the state licensing board. It took a year, but they revoked her license. What she did, the board’s ruling said, was among “the most serious breaches of professional ethics” they had ever reviewed.
I didn’t go after Paul’s estate. Sophie was a child. None of this was her fault. Paul’s will, it turned out, had already set aside a college fund for her. I didn’t contest it.
Instead, I did something that surprised everyone, including me. I boxed up every toy, every card and every photo in that storage unit. And I mailed them to Sophie. With a letter.
“Your dad loved you very much. These belong to you. I’m sorry we never got to meet while he was alive. If you ever want to, when you’re older, I’d be glad to tell you stories about him. Some of them are even good.”
I never expected to hear back.
Two years later, a letter came. In careful, teenage handwriting. “Thank you for the box. I didn’t know he kept all of it. Mom doesn’t really talk about him. Could you tell me one good story?”
I wrote back. I told her about the time Paul tried to fix our dishwasher and flooded the kitchen, and then sat in two inches of water laughing so hard he couldn’t stand up.
She wrote back. We’ve been writing for a year now.
I’m in therapy again. With a different therapist. I checked her license, her references, and her marital status twice.
