I folded the letter.
Mr. Geller stepped toward me.
“Robert?”
“Not now.”
“There are other documents Irene wanted you to see.”
“I can’t read another thing while you’re standing here.”
He nodded, placed his card on the table, and left.
Once the door closed, I stared at Irene’s handwriting.
Then I shouted into the empty house.
“Who were you, Irene?”
My voice echoed through rooms that had spent sixty years holding our conversations.
“You lied to me all those years?”
Irene had always answered me.
This time, she couldn’t.
I called our daughter Penelope because I couldn’t sit alone with the truth.
She lived closest and had inherited Irene’s ability to hear the difference between “I’m fine” and the truth.
Twenty minutes later, she was sitting beside me.
“Mom was married before me,” I told her.
Penelope stared.
“Before you?”
“When she was eighteen.”
