“I don’t know what to do without you,” I whispered.
His eyes brightened. “You have to live. Do you hear me? You have to live.”
“I know,” he said. “So do I.”
“For things I should have told you.”
He opened his mouth as if he wanted to say more, then just shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
“For things I should have told you.” He leaned down and kissed my forehead. “Get some sleep, Hannah.”
He died the next morning.
The funeral was black suits, bad coffee, and people saying, “He was a good man,” as if that explained everything.
“Your uncle asked me to give you this.”
Back home, everything felt wrong.
Ray’s boots by the door. His mug in the sink. The basil plant drooping by the window.
That afternoon, Mrs. Patel knocked and came in. She sat on my bed, her eyes red, and held out an envelope.
“Your uncle asked me to give you this,” she said. “And to tell you he’s sorry. And that… I am too.”
“Sorry for what?” I asked.
Several pages slid onto my lap.
She shook her head. “Read it, beta. Then call me.”
My name was on the envelope, written in her clumsy hand.
My hands trembled as I opened it.
Several pages slid onto my lap.
The first line read:
“Hannah, I’ve lied to you your whole life. I can’t take this with me.”
He wrote about the night of the accident. Not the version I knew.
He wrote about the night of the accident. Not the version I knew. He said my parents had brought my overnight bag. That they had told him they were moving, “new start,” new city.
“They said they weren’t taking you,”
he wrote.
“They said you’d be better off with me because they were a disaster. I lost control.”
He wrote what he had screamed. That my father was a coward. That my mother was selfish.
That they were abandoning me.
“I knew your father had been drinking,”
he wrote.
“I saw the bottle. I could have taken his keys. Called a taxi. Told them to sleep there. I didn’t. I let them leave in anger because I wanted to win.”
Twenty minutes later, the police called.
“You know the rest,”
he wrote.
“Car wrapped around a pole. They were gone. Not you.”
He explained why he hadn’t told me.
“At first, when I saw you in that bed, I looked at you and saw punishment,”
he wrote.
“For my pride. For my temper. I’m ashamed, but you need to know the truth: sometimes, at first, I resented you. Not for what you had done. Because you were proof of what my anger cost me.”
“You were innocent. The only thing you ever did was survive. Bringing you home was the only good choice I had left. Everything that followed was me trying to repay a debt I can never pay.”
