Do you know what that’s like? To give up the love of your life to spare her from your early death, and then to just… keep living? To realize, decade after decade, that you’d broken both your hearts for a funeral that didn’t come?
By the time I understood I wasn’t dying, it was too late. I was married to a good woman who’d stood by me. We had Peter. I couldn’t blow up her life, and yours had moved on — or so I thought. I’d told you never to contact me. I’d built a wall, believing I was doing it to protect you, and by the time I knew the wall had been a mistake, it was load-bearing. Too many lives were built on it to tear it down.
So I did the only thing I could. Every year, on your birthday, I wrote you a letter. I told you what I’d have said if I’d stayed. I told you I loved you. I told you what I was doing, what Peter was like, what I wished our life had been. And then I put each letter in this box, unsent, because sending it would have been unfair to Carol and unfair to you and unfair to the choice I’d made.
