Chapter 17 - PAMELA’S LETTER
Pamela eventually wrote to Matilda after she turned eighteen.
The letter arrived through attorneys.
Matilda asked:
“Should I read it?”
“Your choice.”
She gave me a look.
“You hate when I say that to you.”
“Yes.”
“What would you do?”
“I’m not you.”
“Dad.”
I sighed.
“I would probably read it and then wish I hadn’t.”
She nodded.
“Useful.”
She read it.
Then put it in a drawer.
I didn’t ask what it said.
That may have been the clearest evidence I had changed.
Years earlier, I would have needed every detail.
To assess.
Protect.
Control.
Now I trusted Matilda to decide whether something belonged to me.
Eventually she told me anyway.
Pamela apologized.
No excuses.
No request to rebuild a relationship.
No claim that Spencer manipulated her into everything.
Matilda never replied.
Also her choice.
People sometimes asked whether I forgave Pamela.
I never found a clean answer.
I stopped hating her every day.
Stopped checking where she was incarcerated.
Stopped reading legal updates.
Stopped imagining arguments where I finally said the one perfect sentence that made her understand everything.
Eventually, she occupied less space inside me.
Maybe distance can be one form of forgiveness.
Not absolution.
Release.
I did not need Pamela to become good in order for my life to become good again.
That realization was freeing.
Matilda understood it even earlier.
Her childhood, she once told me, was not “the Pamela years.”
It also contained school plays.
Lost teeth.
Henrietta’s grilled cheese.
Beach trips.
Cartoons.
Friends.
Celia teaching her how to sketch buildings.
Me burning pancakes.
Her mother’s photographs.
The abuse happened.
It mattered.
But no person who harms a child deserves ownership over the child’s entire history.
That sentence stayed with me.
For years I had unconsciously organized Matilda’s life into before Pamela and after Pamela.
Matilda refused.
Good.
She had a bigger life than that.
Eventually, she did something with the La Jolla property Spencer had once wanted to flip.
May you like
Something neither Pamela nor Spencer could possibly have imagined.
She filled it with children.
