Chapter 5: The Woman Who Thought About Me Every Day
Father drove.
I sat in the passenger seat with both envelopes in my lap.
I hadn't opened the second one yet.
I kept my hand flat over it, feeling the slight weight of whatever was inside.
We didn't talk much in the car.
Father turned the radio on low — something instrumental, nothing with words.
After about ten minutes he turned it off again.
"Are you angry?" he asked.
I looked out the window.
A gas station passed.
A school.
A dog being walked by an elderly man who wasn't in any hurry.
"I don't know yet," I said.
"That's honest."
"Why didn't you tell me sooner?"
He was quiet for a moment.
"Because your mother said it would harm you.
And then because I believed that less and less every year.
And then because I'd waited so long that I didn't know how to start." He exhaled.
"None of those are good enough reasons."
"No," I said.
"They're not."
He nodded.
He didn't argue.
---
Diane lived forty minutes from our house.
Forty minutes.
I had driven past her exit on the highway probably a hundred times.
Father pulled up to a small brick house on a quiet street with two large oak trees in the front yard.
A ceramic pot of yellow flowers sat on the front step.
The curtains in the front window were pale blue.
He turned off the engine.
"Does she know we're coming?" I asked.
"I called her this morning.
After I found the envelope." He looked at the house.
"She's been ready for twenty-three years, Maya.
But she would have waited forever if that's what you needed."
I opened the door.
---
She answered before I could knock.
She must have been watching from the window.
Diane was fifty-one years old.
She was shorter than I expected.
Her hair was dark brown threaded with grey, cut simply, and she was wearing a green cardigan — not emerald, softer than that, the color of new leaves.
Her eyes were my eyes.
I saw that immediately and had to look away for a second.
"Maya," she said.
Not a question.
Just my name, spoken carefully, like something she'd practiced keeping steady.
"Hi," I said.
It was inadequate.
I knew it was inadequate.
But it was all I had.
She smiled — a small, uncertain smile, the kind that doesn't know yet if it's allowed to be larger.
"Come in," she said.
"I made tea.
I didn't know what else to do with my hands."
I almost laughed.
It came out as something between a laugh and something else entirely.
---
The living room was modest and careful.
Books on every surface.
A small television.
A shelf near the fireplace with photographs — and I stopped walking when I saw them.
They were of me.
Every stage.
Toddler, gap-toothed child, school photographs with my hair done badly, a candid of me at maybe fifteen laughing at something off-camera, my university acceptance letter framed in a simple black frame.
My whole life, laid out on someone else's shelf.
"Your father sent them," she said behind me.
"Every year."
I turned around.
My eyes were burning.
"You kept all of them."
"Every single one." She pressed her lips together for a moment.
"I used to talk to them.
When things were hard." She shook her head slightly.
"That probably sounds—"
"No," I said.
"It doesn't."
We stood there looking at each other across the small room.
She lifted her hand, just slightly — a gesture that stopped halfway, uncertain whether it was wanted.
I crossed the room and held on to her.
She went very still for one second.
Then her arms came around me and she held on too, and neither of us said anything, because there was nothing that words could have added to what that silence already contained.
Father stood in the doorway behind us.
I heard him clear his throat once, quietly.
Then nothing.
---
We had tea.
Diane wrapped both hands around her mug, and I noticed for the first time how thin her wrists were.
How carefully she moved.
"How long have you been ill?" I asked.
She met my eyes without flinching.
"Two years.
It's manageable right now." A pause.
"The doctors use words like *monitoring* and *stable* and I've learned that those words mean they don't know yet."
"Are you scared?"
"Sometimes." She tilted her head slightly.
"Mostly I was scared I'd run out of time before you knew I existed." She looked at her mug.
"Now I'm less scared."
I set my own mug down.
"I have a lot of questions," I said.
"I know.
Ask me anything.
I've been rehearsing answers for twenty-three years." The corner of her mouth lifted.
"Some of them are even good."
I opened my mouth.
My phone buzzed in my pocket.
I ignored it.
It buzzed again.
Then again.
Rapid, insistent.
I pulled it out to silence it — and saw twelve messages in a row from a number I didn't recognize, and one from Chloe that read: *Maya, come home.
May you like
NOW.
It's bad.*
