“Get away from my family’s table before I have security remove you and your son.” Ethan Blackwood’s voice sliced through one of Chicago’s most expensive restaurants so brutally that the pianist stopped playing, every head turned, and my six-year-old son tightened his tiny hand around mine.

Richard found the last three letters months later.

Not in Eleanor’s room.

In Charles Hale’s private archive.

One was unopened.

One had been copied.

The eleventh had notes written across the envelope.

Do not forward. E.B. instructed no contact.

Ethan received the original.

He asked if I wanted to open it.

“No.”

“You wrote it.”

“That was seven years ago.”

He looked at the envelope.

“Can I?”

“Yes.”

We sat in Richard’s library.

Noah was upstairs.

Ethan opened the letter.

His eyes moved slowly.

Then stopped.

“What did I write?”

He handed it to me.

I read the words my twenty-eight-year-old self had written two weeks before giving birth.

Ethan,

I don’t know whether you hate me, whether your mother told you something, or whether silence really is your answer. But I am having your baby soon. A boy.

My eyes blurred.

I have tried not to ask you for anything. I still won’t ask for money. I am asking for one thing: if you truly want nothing to do with us, tell me yourself. Please don’t make me raise your son wondering whether you ever knew he existed.

I stopped.

Could not finish.

Ethan took the page.

Read the rest silently.

Then cried.

I had never seen Ethan Blackwood cry before.

Not even seven years earlier when his father nearly died.

“I would have come.”

I believed him.

That was the tragedy.

“I know.”

“I would have been there.”