Chapter 7
They were letters.
Every one of them was addressed to me in a man’s blocky, careful handwriting at my parents’ address. Across the front of every single envelope, in my mother’s slanting cursive, were the words RETURN TO SENDER.
But they hadn’t been sent back.
That was the thing my mind couldn’t hold at first. They were marked Return to Sender, and then they had been kept hidden in a box.
For years.
I knew the handwriting on the envelopes before I even opened one.
It was Jesse’s.
My fingers went cold.
I slid the rubber band off. It snapped and fell apart in my hand.
The first envelope on the stack wasn’t a letter at all. It was a children’s birthday card with a cartoon dog on the front. Above the dog, in Jesse’s handwriting, it said:
For my son Dany.
I couldn’t breathe.
Colleen was crying quietly now, standing in the doorway. She told me there was more.
She reached into the box, lifted out a slip of paper—a check stub—and put it in my hand.
It was a canceled check for $600, made out by Jesse to my mother, dated the spring my son was born, endorsed and deposited into my mother’s account.
Money he had sent for his baby that my mother had cashed and kept and never breathed a word about.
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“There’s one more thing you need to know,” Colleen said, and her voice broke on it. “I was in the kitchen once, back then, when he called the house looking for you. Your mother answered. I heard her tell him you’d lost the baby. I heard her say it, Lucy. She told him there was no baby at all, and I was too scared of her to say anything. God forgive me. I was too scared.”
The room tilted.
