PART 7
I opened the envelope with hands that weren’t entirely steady, Jasper watching me carefully from across the table, Mrs. Delacroix quiet now, having apparently said everything she felt she was still allowed to say out loud herself.
Foster, the letter began, in Vivian’s familiar, looping handwriting. If Odile has finally given you this, it means Jasper has turned eighteen, and I have kept a promise to both of you that has cost me more than I think either of you will ever fully understand.
I don’t remember most of the week I left. I remember pieces — a hospital hallway, a psychiatrist’s office, the specific, sick certainty that I was somehow dangerous to my own son, a thought I still can’t fully explain even now, years later, sitting here trying to write this letter clearly enough that you’ll actually believe it.
I signed those papers in a state of mind that wasn’t mine. By the time I was stable enough, months later, to understand what I’d actually done, the divorce had already finalized, and I believed, in my own considerable shame, that showing up again would only hurt both of you further, reopening something I told myself you’d both worked hard to close.
