My breath snagged in my throat. She was expecting a baby. The latter letters were devastatingly raw.
She spoke of shame, fear, and being forced to give the child up for adoption. The letters to Harold became increasingly desperate, pleading for answers, for guidance, for anything, but it seemed he had stopped writing back. Whether he was unable, unwilling, or simply devastated himself, I couldn’t know.
Built a life. A family. A home.
But he had kept Evelyn’s letters. And the suitcase. And the memory.
Why had he never told me? For weeks, I kept the discovery to myself, nursing the ache in private. Part of me felt betrayed, another part overwhelmingly sad not just for me, but for the young man Harold had once been, and the difficult decisions he must have faced.
One evening, our daughter Julia stopped by without warning. She walked into the living room to find the suitcase open, letters spread across the coffee table like spilled secrets. “Mom… what is all this?” she asked, her voice small.
I felt something in me crumble. I couldn’t carry the weight alone any longer. I told her everything slowly, carefully.
Together, we read through the letters, piecing together the fragments of a life neither of us had known. When she finished the last letter, Julia looked at me with wide, glistening eyes. “Do you think… we might have a half-sibling?”
The thought had settled heavily in the back of my mind for weeks.
“It’s possible,” I murmured. “But decades have passed. We may never find them.”
Over the next several weeks, Julia and I cautiously searched through whatever records we could access, public adoption documents, online archives, and old newspaper clippings. It was slow, difficult, Continue reading…
