I stared at him.
“She what?”
“She reads to me.” He lifted his good hand off the railing for a second and touched the side of his head. “I had a stroke last October. Messed up my eyes. I can see okay, mostly. But I can’t read anymore. The words jump all over the place. I can’t keep my place on the line.”
I didn’t say anything.
“She comes every Thursday,” he said. “We’re reading Treasure Island.”
Something hit me in the chest so hard I almost took a step back.
Treasure Island.
I looked at Maddie. She was looking at the ground.
“She does all the voices,” my father said, and something like a smile flickered across the good side of his mouth. “She does a better parrot than I ever did.”
I couldn’t breathe.
“I don’t care,” I said. My voice was shaking so hard I could barely get the words out. “I don’t care if she reads you the whole library. You had no right. No right to see her. No right to let her lie to me. She’s fourteen years old. You knew I didn’t want her anywhere near you.”
“I know,” he said.
“You knew, and you let her come anyway.”
“I told her to tell you,” he said quietly. “Every week. I told her she had to tell you. She was going to tell you this weekend.”
“I was,” Maddie whispered. “I swear I was, Mom. I was going to tell you on Saturday. I even wrote it down so I’d know what to say.”
I didn’t believe her. I didn’t believe either of them. I didn’t believe anything anymore.
My father held out the thing he’d brought out from the house.
It was an envelope.
An old one. A little yellow around the edges. It wasn’t sealed with tape or anything. It had just been closed for a long time, and the flap had stuck down by itself.
“I’m not asking you to come inside,” he said. “I’m not asking you to forgive me. I’m not asking you for anything. I just need you to take this. That’s all.”
“I don’t want anything from you.”
“It’s not from me.”
He held it out a little farther. His hand was trembling.
I looked at it.
On the front of the envelope, in blue ink, it said one word.
“Erin.”
My knees almost went out from under me.
I knew that handwriting. I would know that handwriting anywhere in the world. The big loopy E. The little curl at the end of the N. It was the same handwriting on every birthday card I’d ever gotten. On every permission slip. On every grocery list stuck to our refrigerator with a magnet shaped like a strawberry.
It was my mother’s handwriting.
“Where did you get that?” I whispered.
“She gave it to me,” my father said.
“That’s not possible.”
“Five years ago. Three weeks before she died.”
“That’s not possible,” I said again. “Mom hadn’t spoken to you in twenty years. She hated you.”
My father looked at me for a long time.
“She came here,” he said quietly. “To this house. She sat right there.” He pointed with his cane at the old porch swing hanging at the end of the porch. “She was so thin, Erin. She had a scarf on her head. She could barely walk up the steps. Her friend Donna drove her and waited in the car.”
I stared at that porch swing.
“She gave me this,” he said. “And she told me to give it to you. Whenever I thought you were ready. Whenever I thought it was the right time.”
“Five years,” I said. “You’ve had this for five years.”
“Yes.”
“And you never gave it to me?”
He looked down at the envelope in his shaking hand.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
Adrian Hawthorne is a celebrated author and dedicated archivist who finds inspiration in the hidden stories of the past. Educated at Oxford, he now works at the National Archives, where preserving history fuels his evocative writing. Balancing archival precision with creative storytelling, Adrian founded the Hawthorne Institute of Literary Arts to mentor emerging writers and honor the timeless art of narrative.