PART 10
Jasper had been quiet through most of this, still holding my hand, and when he finally spoke, his voice carried a steadiness I genuinely hadn’t expected from an eighteen-year-old absorbing this much all at once.
“I want to meet her,” he said. “Not instead of you, Dad. I’m not asking for that. I just — I’ve spent my whole life thinking my own mother looked at me and decided I wasn’t worth staying for. Finding out that’s not actually what happened, that’s not something I can just set back down on the table and not do anything about.”
“I understand,” I said, and found, somewhat to my own surprise, that I genuinely did. “I need some time myself, Jasper. Eighteen years of a story doesn’t just rewrite itself in one conversation, even a true one. But I’m not going to stand in the way of you finding out who your mother actually is, now that we both finally have the chance to know.”
PART 11
We reached out to Vivian three weeks later, a careful, tentative email through the address Mrs. Delacroix provided, Jasper writing most of it himself while I read over his shoulder, both of us revising it more times than either of us wanted to admit.
Vivian responded within a single day, a long, careful message that read considerably like the letter had — honest, unguarded, clearly the product of eighteen years of therapy rather than eighteen years of avoidance.
She flew out to meet us six weeks after that, a visit that started, understandably, with more silence than conversation, the three of us sitting in a coffee shop halfway between her current home and ours, working through eighteen years in careful, incomplete pieces neither of us fully expected to resolve in a single afternoon.
