She opened the door, and she was the woman from the photographs, older, and she looked at the two grown men on her porch, and I watched her face do something I will never be able to describe — the collapse of twenty years of hope she’d long stopped letting herself feel.
“Mason?” she whispered. She knew which was which. She’d been keeping track of us, in her mind, our whole lives. “Simon?”
“We never got the letters,” I said. My voice broke on it. “We thought — they told us you abandoned us. We only just found out. We got every one of them yesterday. Seventeen years of them. We read them all.”
My mother put her hand over her mouth, and my hard, withdrawn brother Simon — who hadn’t cried where I could see in fifteen years — made a sound I’d never heard him make, and the three of us stood in a doorway and wept for two decades we’d each spent believing we weren’t wanted by the other.
She’d kept a room. I’ll just tell you that and let it sit, the way it sits in me. For twenty years, in a small house she could barely afford, Nadia had kept a room with two small beds in it, because she said she never fully stopped believing we might one day knock.
We knocked.
Chapter 5: What Kenneth Left
I promised I’d come back to Kenneth, because it matters, and because my mother is the one who gave me the last piece of it.
Kenneth, our adoptive father — the man in the front row, the bikes, “you boys are the most important people in my life” — had loved us genuinely. That was real. But he’d gone along with Beatrice’s scheme in the beginning, weak and in love with a hard woman, and it ate him alive. Nadia told us that in the year before he died, Kenneth had written to her — secretly, behind Beatrice’s back — not knowing Beatrice had told Nadia the boys wanted no contact. His letters, which Nadia kept, were apologies. He told Nadia the truth about the trust. He told her he was trying to find a way to make it right before it was too late.
He died when we were ten, before he could.
See more on the next page
