She sat alone by the lake, the same lake she had once resented without knowing why, and opened the box with shaking hands. Each letter felt like a doorway into a room she had never been allowed to see. In them, Sam spoke to their son with a tenderness and devastation she had longed for but never witnessed. He remembered small jokes, missed milestones, the weight of an empty chair at every holiday. The pages carried the love she had mistaken for indifference.
As she read, anger loosened its grip, replaced by a sorrow gentler and more complicated. She understood then that his silence had not been absence, but a different kind of breaking. They had both drowned, just in separate waters. Sitting in the fading light, with the letters spread around her like fallen leaves, she finally forgave him—and, quietly, forgave herself.
