And then Beatrice told Nadia, every time she wrote, that the boys didn’t want to see her.
And told us that our mother had thrown us away and never looked back.
She ran the lie in both directions for twenty years. To keep the money. To keep us grateful and small. To keep a mother and her sons believing the other had stopped loving them.
Seventeen years of letters, in a cedar box, that our mother wrote to us and Beatrice collected like evidence of a crime she was proud of.
Chapter 4: The Birthday Card
The last letter in the box was postmarked that spring.
Nadia was still writing. At fifty-one now, two decades into a silence she had no reason to believe would ever break, our mother had still sent two birthday cards that year, to an address where they were received by a woman who laughed about it over cake.
