Chapter 7 - The Letters That Never Reached Me
The metal box contained thirty-seven letters from Thomas.
None had been opened.
All addressed to me.
Ages ten through fourteen.
Birthday cards.
Christmas notes.
A photograph of him standing beside a fishing boat.
A letter that began:
Abby, I do not know what you have been told about me, but I have not stopped asking to see you.
Another:
The court says I must wait until the therapist recommends contact. I will wait. I just need you to know waiting is not the same as leaving.
I read that sentence six times.
Waiting is not the same as leaving.
My mother had spent my entire adolescence teaching me the opposite.
She kept the letters because destroying them was risky.
Hiding them was easier.
There was also a certified-mail receipt showing one final letter had been returned by Evelyn herself.
REFUSED.
That was the second layer of evidence.
Not memory.
Not accusation.
Paper.
I asked Morales if Thomas was still alive.
She looked almost surprised.
“Yes.”
He was sixty-seven and living outside Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.
Retired electrician.
Remarried once, widowed five years ago.
No additional children.
“Does he know about Hunter?”
“We haven’t contacted him yet.”
My chest tightened.
“Don’t.”
Morales waited.
“Not yet.”
She nodded.
I was not ready for a father just because evidence said he had wanted to be one.
That was another lesson this case kept forcing on me:
facts can correct history without immediately repairing relationships.
Meanwhile, prosecutors found another link between past and present.
The same shed appeared in two old family-court photographs submitted by Evelyn during the divorce.
Back then she described it as a “safe outdoor playroom.”
It had a folding chair inside even then.
Same yellow wall.
Same narrow window.
The chair found behind the plywood partition was newer.
The room was not.
Hunter’s “practice room” had been my practice room first.
May you like
Evelyn had not invented a new method for controlling my son.
She had reopened an old one.
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