Please don't be angry that I kept it from you. I was eighteen and heartbroken and trying to protect everyone, including you, from a grief I could barely hold myself.
Give my son both his grandmothers. Tell him his father loved his mother for one perfect summer. Tell him he comes from love, not from a mystery.
And tell him I'm sorry I couldn't stay.
I love you, Mom. I love him already, so much, even now, before I've met him.
Take care of each other.
— Emily"
I looked up from the letter, and Margaret was crying, and I was crying, and I understood, finally, everything my daughter had carried alone.
She hadn't kept a shameful secret. She'd kept a grief too heavy to speak, and a plan — a beautiful, generous, eighteen-year-old's plan — to make sure that her death wouldn't leave two grandmothers alone with their losses when they could have had each other, and a boy.
