I swear to God, he gazed right into her eyes in the most romantic, loving way I could've imagined. “I love you, too.” Luke flickered his attention at me then headed down the hall.
Amy and I settled on the sofa in the living room. The cleansing breaths I'd been taking since first coming up on her building were doing nothing to calm my heart or my head. The letter was sitting right there on the coffee table, like a death sentence orFINat the end of a French film, and it struck me how impossibly simple this moment was…weeks and months and years of worry about this coming out, and what it would do to my relationship with my sister, and it all came down to a piece of paper stuffed into an envelope. I had to believe that she and I were stronger than whatever was in that letter. We'd weathered so much impossible shit and we always came out on the other side of it, stronger.
She handed it to me. “I’ve read it fifty times. I understand the words, but it doesn't make any sense. It has to be a sick joke or his brother is trying to get money out of me, but that doesn't make sense either.”
My hands were shaking as I unfolded it, which was nothing more than cheap printer paper. For a moment, all I saw were marks of black on white, but then it came into focus.
Dear Amy,
By the time you receive this letter, I will be gone. I have late stage lung cancer and don't have long to live. I guess all those cigarettes I smoked when I was a teenager finally caught up to me. One thing you learn when you're facing death is that there are certain things you must say before you leave this world. You can't rest until you've said them. I need peace. That is the aim of my letter.
I want you to know that I loved your mother very much. No, it wasn't right for us to be together, but we couldn't stay apart. We tried many times over the years, but some bonds are simply unbreakable. They won't go away no matter how hard you try. I know I didn't lose as much as you and your sister did on that January day, but I lost the love of my life. She was my one bright spot. I could never marry anyone else. No one could hold a candle to your mom. Losing her left a void that was impossible to fill.
I don't have much family, Amy. In fact it's just you and my brother, who was instructed to mail this letter to you after my death. You will receive a more formal notification from the attorney about the terms of my will. I didn't have much to leave you, but there's some money, as well as a few of your mother's things. They're not much, just small things she'd left at my house:
Two lipsticks (one red, one pink)
One pair small gold hoop earrings
One bottle of perfume
The makeup is so old by now. I probably should've thrown it away. But I could never bring myself to do it. She meant that much to me.
I also saved the letters your mother wrote to me over the years. I don't know if it's appropriate for you to have them, as they contain a lot of romantic sentiments. But they are a piece of her, and I kept them, so I'll leave that decision up to you. You may contact my brother if you would like to have them. He's under instructions to dispose of them if he doesn't hear from you within a year.
I hope you live a long and happy life. I hope your sister does as well. You girls were the light of your mother's life and she loved you both very much. I hope you know that. I hope you felt it during the years you had with her, because I know first-hand that those years were not enough. She had a very generous heart. That is the thing I will remember about her most. It's impossible to forget.
I'm sorry we never got to have a traditional relationship. It never felt right to reach out to you after your mother passed away. I didn't want to intrude on the life you had with the family you had left. Your mother and I were never certain whether you are my biological daughter. All I can say is that every time I looked at you, I knew with my heart that you were mine.
With all my love,
Gordon Stewart
Tears ran down my face. It was as bad as I'd imagined, but somehow worse. As sad as my mother's story was, it was now even more tragic. He had adored her. Everything she had said to me that morning about how much she loved him was apparently returned, in equal measure. And had I been nothing more than a clueless kid who didn't get it? Absolutely. Had the feelings between them been stronger than what was between her and my dad?
How do you even measure the strength of love?
By seeing how long it lasts? Whether it can survive the tests life throws at it? All these years later, as recently as a few months ago, Gordon Stewart was still walking this earth and loving my mom.
But what if things had been different? What if we had gone to live with Gordon Stewart? Would she have been happy? What would have happened when the supposed drudgery of routine—school lunches and weeknight dinners and laundry and the same sex every Saturday night—took over? Would she have eventually become unhappy with him? Was there some gene in my mother's line that made hearts want to wander? She might have felt trapped in her marriage, but if she'd gone to be with Gordon, she could've very well been walking into another trap.
“Well?” Amy asked, with all the impatient agitation a rightfully freaked out person could muster.
“I don't even know where to start.” It was the truth. There was a lot to unpack. Decades of an unproven secret, of a guess my mother let slip, left lurking in my brain.
“Do you think it's true? Do you think I'm really his daughter?” She sprang from her end of the couch and started pacing on the other side of the coffee table, flapping her hands and shaking her head. “What if it's really true? My dad isn't who I think he is?”
“It says that he wasn't certain about it.”
“But he left me money. Nothing is more certain than money. Why do that?”
I shook my head and put the letter back where it belonged—in the damn envelope. “He said he had almost no family.”
“Almost, Katherine. Almost. If you aren't sure, you just leave it all to your brother. You don't write the letter. You only write what he wrote and talk to a lawyer about putting someone in your will if you're really, really, really fucking sure about it.” Her face was ruddy with frustration all while my heart was sinking to my stomach.
“I have to tell you something.”
She froze for a heartbeat or two then turned to me. She was impossibly still, like a cat waiting for the perfect moment to pounce. “Why are you not more freaked out about this? You hated him just as much as I did. Maybe more.”
