I loved you. I love you still. Nothing about Anna changed that. But love is not the same as honesty, and I know now that I have done you a terrible wrong.
There are more letters in this chest. Some explain practical matters. One contains Anna’s address. She has a son named Eli. He is innocent in all this. If you choose never to see either of them, I will understand that too, though I have no right to ask understanding of you.
I am so deeply sorry for the pain this will bring you.
Thomas
I read it once. Then again. Then I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth because something ugly and animal was trying to crawl out of my throat.
I wanted to hate him cleanly.
That would have been easier.
But grief is cruel that way. It does not wait politely for betrayal to finish speaking. I still loved him. Even then. Even on that hallway floor with proof that the man I trusted most had lied to me for decades, I still loved the way he warmed my side of the bed with his feet and made pancakes on birthdays and whispered, “Drive safe,” every time I left the house.
And that made it worse.
Because if he had been cold or careless or obviously false, the story would have made sense.
But he had been loving.
He had simply made room in his life for both love and deception and asked me, without my knowing, to live inside both.
By evening the hallway was dark, and I was still sitting there surrounded by the ruins of what I thought I knew.
At some point, I found the letter with Anna’s address.
I did not go that night.
I did not sleep either.
