The next morning, my mother called and asked me to come over before anyone else arrived. She was holding an envelope she’d found among my sister’s things, and my name was written across the front in my sister’s handwriting. Inside was a letter she’d apparently written months earlier but never sent. She said the affair was the worst thing she’d ever done, but it wasn’t the reason she’d stayed away from me all those years. She had been trying to tell me something about the child she’d just given birth to.
I asked my mother where the baby was. She said the baby was alive, but there was something the hospital had told the family that nobody had wanted to discuss while my sister was in labor. Then she handed me another page. My sister had written that she’d spent fifteen years trying to contact me without knowing whether I would ever forgive her. She said the baby wasn’t my ex-husband’s. The father was someone she’d met after I cut them both off, and she’d kept his identity secret because she was afraid he’d try to take the baby away.
I sat there reading the letter again and again until I reached the final paragraph. My sister had written that if anything happened to her, I was the only person she trusted to raise her child. My mother said the hospital social worker had already asked who would take responsibility for the baby, and my sister had given them my name weeks before she died. I couldn’t breathe. After fifteen years of telling myself she was dead to me, I suddenly had a little girl who had lost her mother—and somehow, my sister had still believed I would come for her.
