For twelve years, I carried my grief like a banner and my anger like a shield, convinced I was the only one brave enough to stand in the ruins of our family. I mistook his silence for indifference, his distance for betrayal, and his new life as proof that our son had been easy for him to forget. The story I told myself became its own prison.
The box shattered that narrative. Inside, his letters bled with the same unbearable love and guilt I thought only I possessed. Every unsent apology, every memory he preserved in ink, revealed a man gutted by loss, just in a language I never learned to read. I realized we hadn’t failed our son; we’d only failed to see each other’s pain. I couldn’t rewrite our past, but I could finally set down the weight of being the only one who cared.
