Every year I maintained it, I was telling myself — and telling her, even though she couldn’t hear me — that the door was still open.”*
*”I met your mother two years later.
Carol was kind and warm and she deserved better than a man who was still half in love with someone else.
I want you to know that I loved your mother.
Not the way I loved Eleanor — that was something different, something from before I knew how much life could ask of you.
But I loved her truly, and I was faithful to her, and when she left us I grieved her completely.”*
Daniel’s jaw tightened.
He kept reading.
*”I never told you about Eleanor because I didn’t know how.
Every year it became harder.
She was the part of me that existed before you, before the business, before everything I became.
She felt like a secret not because she was shameful but because she was sacred.
I was wrong to keep her from you.
That is the one thing in this letter I am asking your forgiveness for.”*
The room was very quiet.
*”Now.
The thing I need you to know.”*
Daniel turned to the second page.
*”Eleanor does not know this.
I am telling you both at the same time because you both deserve the truth.”*
*”When Eleanor left for college, she wrote to me.
One letter.
I received it three months after she’d gone.
In it, she told me she was sorry for leaving the way she had.
She said she hoped I would understand someday.
She said she thought about me every day.”*
*”I never wrote back.”*
*”I was hurt and I was proud and I was twenty years old and I made the worst decision of my life.
I put her letter in a box and I told myself I would reply when I was ready.
I was never ready.
The years passed.
And the letter stayed in the box.”*
Daniel looked up at me.
I had gone very still.
*”Eleanor,”* Daniel read, his voice quieter now, *”the letter is in the box Mr.
Hale gave you.
Underneath the keys.
In the small brown envelope at the bottom.
I kept it for fifty-four years.
I am sorry it took me this long to send it back to you.”*
Mr.
Hale was watching me.
I thought about the box.
The keys.
The letter I had read.
The second envelope I had opened.
I had not looked beneath the keys.
I had not seen a small brown envelope.
“I need to go home,” I said.
