Chapter 4 - What the Letters Said
The first letter was dated in January, six weeks after I'd left for Seattle, and Cassandra's handwriting, usually neat and controlled, wavered across the page in a way that told me exactly how much the words had cost her to write.
Damon — I don't know if this will reach you, or if you'll even want it to. I found out yesterday that I'm pregnant. I've spent the last twenty-four hours trying to figure out what I want to say to you, and I keep landing on the same simple truth: whatever happened between us, whatever mistakes either of us made, this baby deserves a father who knows they exist. I'm not asking you to come back to me. I'm asking you to at least know.
I read that letter three times before I could make myself move to the next one, my chest tight with an ache that felt entirely new — not the familiar discomfort of a difficult business decision, but something rawer, closer to grief for a version of the last three years I hadn't known I'd lost.
The second letter, dated in March, informed me the pregnancy was twins. The third, in June, described morning sickness that had lasted far longer than expected and Cassandra's fear about managing two infants alone on a nurse's modest salary. The fourth, dated in September, simply read: I'm scared, Damon. I know you might never see this. But I needed to write it down somewhere, to someone, even if that someone never actually reads it.
I set that letter down for a long moment, unable to continue immediately, aware of Cassandra watching me carefully from beside me, her expression unreadable.
The letters continued through that first year — the twins' birth in November, two weeks premature, both requiring a brief stay in the neonatal intensive care unit that Cassandra described with a clinical detail I recognized as her professional nursing background asserting itself even through obvious fear. Milo's first smile. Hazel's stubborn refusal to sleep through the night for the first eight months. The exhausting, isolating work of raising infant twins essentially alone, supplemented only by occasional help from Cassandra's widowed mother, who lived two states away and could only visit sporadically.
"You did all of this by yourself," I said quietly, more statement than question, somewhere around the eighth letter.
"I had my mother when she could come," Cassandra said. "And I had a wonderful woman, Delores, who ran an informal daycare out of her home two blocks from my apartment and charged me almost nothing because she said watching me try to manage twins alone broke her heart. But essentially, yes. Alone."
The later letters, from the second year, grew shorter, less frequent, the raw emotional urgency of the first year gradually replaced by something more matter-of-fact — updates rather than pleas, as if Cassandra had slowly, painfully accepted that these letters existed more for her own processing than any realistic hope of reaching me.
The final letter, dated eight months earlier, was the shortest of all.
Damon — I don't know why I'm still writing these. Maybe habit. Maybe some part of me still hopes. The twins turn two next month. Milo has your exact laugh, which is strange and wonderful and sometimes painful to hear. Hazel has started drawing, mostly scribbles, but yesterday she drew something she insisted was a house with three people in it and called it "our family," and I didn't correct her, because I didn't know how to explain that our family looks different than the one she was imagining. I think this might be the last letter I write. Not because I've stopped wishing you knew about them. Because I think it's time I stop waiting for a response that clearly isn't coming, and focus entirely on the two children who actually need me.
I closed my eyes, holding that final letter, feeling the full weight of what I'd cost all three of them through nothing more than negligence — not cruelty, not deliberate abandonment, but a kind of thoughtless self-absorption that felt, somehow, almost worse for being so mundane.
"I need you to know something," I said, opening my eyes and turning to face Cassandra directly. "I'm not going to pretend reading these fixes anything. But I'm done being the man who let a company's growth excuse three years of not knowing my own children existed. Whatever it takes, starting tonight, I intend to actually be present for Milo and Hazel, in whatever way you're willing to allow, for the rest of both their lives."
May you like
Cassandra studied my face for a long moment, searching for something — sincerity, perhaps, or evidence that this declaration was more than the kind of confident promise I'd once made about a Seattle relocation before abandoning it entirely once it became inconvenient.
"We'll see," she said finally, which was, I understood, considerably more than I currently deserved.
