The return address was real.
I drove there with Simon. Neither of us spoke the whole way. What do you say, on the drive to meet the mother you were told abandoned you, holding proof that she spent half her life trying to reach you?
She opened the door, and she was the woman from the photographs, older, and she looked at the two grown men on her porch, and I watched her face do something I will never be able to describe — the collapse of twenty years of hope she’d long stopped letting herself feel.
“Mason?” she whispered. She knew which was which. She’d been keeping track of us, in her mind, our whole lives. “Simon?”
“We never got the letters,” I said. My voice broke on it. “We thought — they told us you abandoned us. We only just found out. We got every one of them yesterday. Seventeen years of them. We read them all.”
