though she were old enough not to need help. But when she looked at Maya, she saw a child who had been preparing to pack a suitcase because she thought nobody wanted her. Tessa understood, with an awful clarity, that whatever had happened to her did not make what she had done acceptable.
“Because I was jealous,” she said finally. “Because Mom wrote that she wanted you to know you belonged here, and I thought she should've written that to me. I know that's horrible. I know.”
“She did write to you,” Marcus said.
Tessa looked up so quickly that her braids brushed her shoulders. “What?”
Marcus lifted a small envelope from the stack, its edges decorated with tiny blue stars. Across the front Claire had written, For Tessa, when you are afraid of being replaced. He placed it on the table but did not push it toward her. “She wrote letters for both of you. More than I can count without taking an afternoon. Your mother knew you would have hard days, too.”
Tessa stared at her own name. “You knew about them?”
“I found them after the funeral.”
“And you just kept them?” Her voice rose. “For almost two years?”
Marcus absorbed the question. It would have been easy to explain his grief until it sounded like an excuse. He had watched Claire die. He had signed paperwork with hands that could barely hold a pen. He had come home to a kitchen where her coffee mug was still sitting beside the sink. But his girls had lost her too, and he had never asked whether they needed the words he could not bear to read.
“Yes,” he said. “I kept them. That was wrong. I thought I was protecting you from more pain, but I was protecting myself from feeling it. I should have told you they existed and let you decide when you were ready.”
Tessa swallowed. For a moment her anger had nowhere familiar to go. Then she said, “Last spring I won second place at the regional art show. Did you know the certificate is under my mattress?”
Marcus blinked. “I knew about the award.”
“You knew I told you. That's different. You didn't come. You were working.”
“I called you as soon as I could.”
“You called from the bus depot. I could hear somebody asking you about a broken transmission while I was trying to tell you about my painting.” She glanced toward Maya, then looked back at him. “And when you promised we'd go out, Maya got sick, and that was the end of it. I know it wasn't her fault. I know. But every time something mattered to me, it felt like I was supposed to be old enough to understand why it couldn't matter right then.”
Marcus remembered the evening now: the clinic, the fever, the pharmacy line, the dinner reservation he had canceled with a note on his phone. He had never made another reservation. He had praised Tessa's painting, hung a photograph of it in his office, and believed that was enough. He looked at her and saw not an angry teenager but the little girl in the gold frame, still waiting for him to keep a promise.