At the bottom of the tin she found a thin envelope addressed to her in Loretta's precise handwriting. Naomi had seen it before and had assumed it was one of the birthday letters her mother used to write when she knew she would be working nights. She opened it with the care she used to handle fragile photographs. The date was from six months before Loretta died, written after a difficult hospital admission that neither of them had wanted to discuss. Naomi unfolded the paper, read the first line, and began to cry before she reached the second.
"My sweet girl," the letter began, "there are some things I was too proud to talk about when they were fresh and too tired to talk about once the years had passed." Loretta explained the February visit without bitterness, describing the courage it took to knock on a grieving family's door and the humiliation of being told that her word was not worth believing. She admitted that she had been angry for a long time, not at Daniel but at people who treated her pregnancy like an accusation. She had decided not to tell Naomi every cruel detail because a child needed room to feel loved, not a family history built entirely from rejection. But she had always intended that Naomi would know the truth when she was ready.
The final paragraph was written in the uneven handwriting of a woman whose strength was failing. "You have made a life I could only dream of making for myself," Loretta wrote. "You are not a missing piece of their family, even if they turn out to be missing a piece of yours. If they ever come to you, don't let anybody tell you what forgiveness should look like. Remember that I loved your father, that he loved me, and that neither one of us needed anyone's permission to make you worth loving."
Naomi held the paper against her chest and wept as quietly as she could. She had grieved for her mother in busy, responsible pieces, between school pickups and medication rounds and the monthly bills. There had been no time to sit with the things she never asked. Now she cried for the young woman who had traveled alone to the Ward house, for the older woman who had written this letter from a hospital bed, and for the child she had been, studying a photograph and trying to imagine a father. She did not notice Evelyn standing in the doorway until the older woman said her name.
"I won't ask to read it," Evelyn said. "I just wanted to make sure you were all right." Naomi wiped her face with her sleeve. "My mother wrote down what you did," she said. Evelyn closed her eyes for a moment. "I'm glad she did. I hope she wrote down what a coward I was." Naomi looked at her, startled by the word. Evelyn sat on the edge of the couch but did not move closer. "I used to tell myself that I was grieving and that grief made me say terrible things. But there were other grieving people who didn't behave as I did. Your mother was one of them."