The first letter was dated October 1994, only weeks after my father and I stopped speaking. He wrote that he knew what had happened and that he had known almost immediately, but he hadn’t known how to tell me without making everything worse. Then he named the person who had told him. It was my aunt. The same aunt who had spent thirty years telling everyone I had abandoned my family, the same aunt whose house held every letter I’d ever written to my father, and the same aunt who had never once told me that my father was writing back. He said she’d come to him after I left and told him that I hadn’t walked away because I didn’t love him. I had left because someone had given him a story about me that wasn’t true, and he’d believed it before I ever got the chance to explain.
I read the second letter with my hands shaking. My father said he’d written to me every few months because he couldn’t live with what he’d done, but my aunt had convinced him that I didn’t want to hear from him. She told him I’d asked everyone not to contact me, which was a lie. I had been writing to him four times a year for twelve years, apologizing for something I hadn’t even understood, because I thought he’d chosen not to answer. He said he had eventually realized something was wrong when one of my letters mentioned a detail only the two of us could have known. He confronted my aunt, and she admitted she’d been keeping the letters because she was afraid that if he and I spoke again, he would tell me the truth about what happened in 1994. He wrote that he wanted to come find me, but by then his health was failing and he was ashamed of how many years he’d allowed to disappear.
The last letter was written in 2006 and had never been stamped. He said he’d finally learned the entire truth from the person who had been there that night, and that he’d spent years trying to decide whether telling me would give me peace or simply reopen something I’d managed to survive. Then he wrote the sentence that made me put the letter down: “Your aunt didn’t keep those letters because she hated you; she kept them because she was the reason you left, and she knew that once you heard my side, you’d never forgive her.” Underneath that, he’d written one more thing. He said there was a reason he’d never sent the letter, and that reason wasn’t fear of my aunt anymore. It was because the person who finally told him the truth was dying too, and before she died, she made him promise never to tell me what she’d done to protect me.
