Until now.
Until I understood that running had not spared her anything.
It had only delayed the truth.
Chapter 67
Present
Claire
The pages were not pristine.
That was the first thing I noticed when I took them from his hands.
They were folded too many times, the creases soft and worn, as if he had carried them with him longer than he meant to. The ink was dark in some places and faint in others, pressed harder where the words must have hurt to write, lighter where his hand had faltered.
I read slowly.
My body resisted the act. Because every sentence felt like it was opening something that had long ago scarred over, something I had learned to live with sealed shut.
Halfway down the first page, I saw a smear where the ink had bled slightly, the letters blurred just enough to lose their edges. Below it, another. Then another.
Tears. I traced the place with my finger without thinking, the pad of it brushing the warped paper where moisture had once soaked in.
I had spent years imagining his absence as clean and cruel in its simplicity.
Seeing this undid that illusion.
I kept reading.
And somewhere between his fear and his shame and the awful, human unraveling laid bare on those pages, something inside me finally shifted into place.
The missing piece.
I had always told myself I did not need it. That understanding would not change what had happened. That it would only reopen wounds better left alone.
But the truth was quieter than that.
It did not hurt the way I had expected.
Instead, it answered the question I had carried for years without ever letting myself ask out loud.
Why.
Everyone had told me it was not my fault. Friends. Family. Therapists. Even strangers who heard the story secondhand and shook their heads in sympathy.
And I had known that must be the truth.
But knowing something intellectually does not mean your heart does.
There had been a version of me, twenty-two and painfully earnest, who lay awake at night replaying every moment of that week, searching for the mistake. The missed sign. The wrong word. The thing I should not have said or should have done differently.
Had I asked for too much. Had I wanted too much. Had I loved him in a way that made him feel trapped.
That girl had wondered, in the privacy of her own mind, if she had driven him to it.
Reading his words now did something unexpected.
