PART 9
I set the letter down on the table, my hands shaking now in a way that had nothing to do with anger.
“Eighteen years,” I said quietly. “I built an entire understanding of my own life around a woman who abandoned us because our son wasn’t the child she wanted. I told him that story, Odile, in every silence I never quite explained, every time he asked why his mother wasn’t around and I changed the subject instead of answering honestly.”
“I know,” Mrs. Delacroix said. “I watched you build that story for eighteen years, and I understand exactly why you built it, given what you actually witnessed that week. I made a promise to a woman in the worst crisis of her life, Foster, and I’ve spent every year since wondering whether keeping it was actually the right thing to do, or simply the easiest thing to keep doing once I’d started.”
