“Me, too.”
We sat together, listening to the distant sound of a neighbor’s dog bark, the soft chirping of evening crickets. Life had moved forward around us, but grief had its own slow rhythm.
After a long silence, Jacob said, “Are you going to meet them?”
I sighed gently. “Maybe. Not to fix everything. Just to acknowledge it.”
“If you do, I’ll go with you.”
I smiled. “Thank you.”
He shrugged. “We’re a team.”
And we were.
A few days later, I made the decision. I didn’t want bitterness to be the last chapter of our story. Not theirs. Not mine. And not Jacob’s. The past would never disappear, but maybe, just maybe, it didn’t have to own the future.
So I picked up the phone and dialed the number written at the bottom of my mother’s letter.
It rang twice. Then three times.
Finally, her voice—tentative, small, nothing like the woman who once threw me out of her kitchen. “Hello.”
“Hi,” I said quietly. “It’s me.”
There was a sharp inhale on the other end. “Oh… oh, sweetheart.”
That word hit me like an unexpected gust. Not because I believed it, but because I realized how long I had lived without hearing it.
“I’m willing to meet,” I said. “In public. Somewhere neutral.”
“Yes, yes, of course. Anywhere, anytime.”
We settled on a small diner just outside town, the kind with vinyl booths and pies displayed behind a glass case, a place with no history attached to it.
When I arrived, they were already seated, both looking nervous, hands clasped on the table like schoolchildren waiting for a principal’s verdict. I slid into the booth across from them.
Nobody spoke at first.
My father cleared his throat. “Thank you for coming.”
My mother reached for her water glass as if bracing herself. “We thought you wouldn’t.”
“I almost didn’t,” I said honestly. “But avoiding things only gives them more power.”
They exchanged a glance, one filled not with manipulation, but something closer to humility.
My mother spoke first. “We were terrible parents.”
My father nodded. “Worse than terrible.”
A strange mix of pain and relief washed over me. Admissions of guilt rarely erase wounds, but they can loosen their grip.
“What you did,” I said slowly, “shaped my entire life. Every decision I made, every fear I carried, every step I took came from what happened when I was 16.”
