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.”
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.”
