“That isn’t the same thing.”
“No,” she admitted. “But he did not always understand the difference.”
Denise Porter remained near the doorway, giving the family room to speak while quietly observing every change in Silas’s expression.
I pulled out the chair beside him.
“Would you like a break?”
Silas shook his head.
“I’ve had seven years of breaks.”
No one knew what to say to that.
Daniel returned to Elena’s letter.
“She says she wrote afterward. Once a month at first. Then on birthdays and holidays.”
He looked toward the hidden room, where the envelopes addressed to Silas waited on the bed.
“Those letters only started fourteen months ago.”
Evelyn pressed her lips together.
“The earlier ones never reached me.”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know.”
Daniel studied her face.
“Mom.”
“I found the first recent letter beneath the front mat,” she said. “There was no stamp. Elena must have brought it herself. After that, I gave her a post office box.”
“You helped her contact Silas without telling me.”
“I helped her write.”
“You hid the letters.”
“I was waiting for the right moment.”
Daniel looked around the crowded kitchen.
“At what point did you think the right moment was coming?”
Evelyn’s shoulders lowered.
It was not defeat.
It was recognition.
“I kept thinking I would know,” she said. “I thought one morning I would wake up and remember exactly how to fix everything.”
Silas picked at a loose corner of the paper on which he had drawn the houses.
“Maybe fixing things isn’t one morning.”
His grandmother looked at him.
“No,” she said. “Maybe it isn’t.”
Daniel read the last paragraph silently before turning the letter over.
On the back, Elena had written a phone number.
Beneath it were six words:
I will accept whatever you decide.
Daniel stared at the number.
“Call her,” Silas said.
His father looked up.
“Right now?”
“You told me we wouldn’t say later anymore.”
Daniel’s face tightened.
“That doesn’t mean we rush into something before we understand it.”
Silas looked toward the hidden room.
“Everybody waited to understand. Nobody told me anything.”
There was no accusation in his voice. Only exhaustion.
Daniel rubbed his thumb over the edge of the paper.
