My Cassian,
I don't know when you'll find this. I don't know how old you are now or what your life looks like. I hope it's good. I hope it's so much better than what I could give you.
I need to tell you things I was too afraid to say out loud.
I was not strong enough. That is the truest thing I can give you and I know it costs you to hear it. I was not strong enough for the life I was living and I chose a way out that left you behind, and there is no version of that I can make okay. I've tried to find words for it and there aren't any. I'm sorry. That's all I have. I'm so sorry.
But I need you to know — you are not him. You are not your father. I watched you your whole life and I know what you're made of and it is nothing like him. He is cold in a way that goes all the way down. You were never cold. Even when you tried to be.
I know about the boy next door. The good thing in your life. The light you need.
Rowan.
I used to watch you sometimes from the window — I saw you cross the yard in the dark more than once, saw the light go on in his room when you got there. I didn't say anything. I didn'tknow what to say. I just knew that you were different over there. Like you could breathe.
I hope you're still breathing.
I hope wherever you are, he's still there. I hope you let him. It’s okay to love him. I want you to be who you are. Whoever that is.
I know you. I know you will have spent years deciding you're too much, too dark, too broken to deserve something good. I need you to hear this from me: that is not true. That has never been true. You were the most tender thing that ever came out of my life and I failed you completely and you still chose to be kind. To show up. To care. To love.
Don’t let it break you. Don’t let that be your story. Be stronger than me.
You came from something terrible and you chose something different and I need you to know I saw that. I always saw that.
I love you. I have loved you every single day. I will love you from wherever I end up.
Be happy, baby. Please.
Be so unbearably, embarrassingly, completely happy.
That's all I want.
—Mom
He went to therapy the following Tuesday without me saying a word.
He came home and sat on the floor next to my chair and I moved down to the floor with him and we stayed like that until my dad called us for dinner.
That was eight months ago.
The letter lives in the drawer of his nightstand now.
He doesn't talk about it much. Sometimes I catch him just holding it — carefully, like he's still figuring out how to carry what's inside it.
I don't push.
I just stay.
• • •
Later, I go to the grocery store.
This is not a romantic or significant thing. We need milk. And my dad has been making pointed comments about the lack of decent coffee in this house for three days, which is ironic because I am the one who buys the coffee, so really he's making pointed comments about me, which I choose not to engage with.
I'm gone maybe forty minutes.
When I get back and put the bags down and go out the back door to check if my dad left the hose out again —
