He stared at the letter as if it were a live wire, humming with everything she’d never managed to say. Her words to me were careful, halting, full of the truths she’d never risked laying at his feet. Not because he was undeserving, but because he had always been the mirror she feared: every regret, every missed tenderness, every year she could no longer redo. Her shame had hardened into distance, and distance had looked, from his side, like deliberate abandonment.
When his fury crumbled, what remained was a boy who had waited too long to be chosen. His grief was for the conversations that never happened, the apologies she never trusted herself to offer. I told him this letter did not prove he’d been loved less, only that she’d been more afraid. Love, I said, is not the words we leave behind, but the ones we risk while we still can.
