She said it was her stepfather. She had been seventeen, angry with me, and desperate to tell somebody what was happening in our house because she thought I would never believe her. He had listened without interrupting, and when she finished he hadn’t told her she was wrong or that she was exaggerating. He had simply asked her one question: whether I knew. She said she didn’t think I did. Then he told her something I had never heard before — that he’d known about it for years, and that he’d been waiting for the right time to tell me himself. My daughter said she begged him not to because she was afraid of what would happen to the family, and he promised her he wouldn’t say anything unless she was in danger.
Then she looked at me across that table and told me what she had actually been hiding all those years. She hadn’t stopped coming around because she hated me. She had stopped because every time she came home, she saw the same person in the house and remembered what she’d been trying not to remember. She said there had been nights when she’d called her stepfather from the driveway and asked him to come get her, and he always did, but afterward he told her to let me believe she was simply being difficult because he was afraid that if I knew the truth, I’d confront the wrong person. I asked her why she had waited until she was thirty-one to tell me, and she said because she’d spent twenty years believing that telling me would destroy me. Then she reached into her purse and put an envelope on the table.
Inside was a letter she’d written in 2009 and never given me. Her stepfather had kept it for her, along with three photographs and a receipt from a motel in the next county. She said she’d found the envelope in his things after his funeral and carried it around for years because she couldn’t decide whether opening it would make anything better. I read the letter twice before I understood the last line. She hadn’t written that she was leaving me. She’d written that she was leaving because somebody had told her that if she stayed, I would eventually find out what he’d done — and the person who warned her was the one person I had spent five years blaming for taking my daughter away from me.
