Ordinary things.
Beautiful things.
The kind of things my parents had nearly taken from us because they believed their desires mattered more than our security.
A year after the assault, I received a letter from my mother.
It arrived in a plain white envelope with my name written in her familiar handwriting.
For several minutes, I left it on the kitchen counter.
Then I opened it.
She wrote about regret, about how quickly everything had fallen apart, and about how she wished she could return to the afternoon when she had walked into my house believing she could convince me to surrender it.
She admitted that she had spent years treating Melanie’s needs as more important than mine.
She admitted that she had allowed my father to control the family because challenging him would have meant confronting the things she had spent her life avoiding.
And she wrote one sentence that made me stop reading.
