The floor seemed to shift beneath me.
Harold.
My father.
I sat down without realizing it.
Dad had died when Adrian was still a baby.
Cancer.
Fast and brutal.
Near the end, he barely had the strength to raise his head, but every day he still asked me, “How’s my boy?” as though Adrian was the center of the universe.
***Adrian never really knew him.***
He had photographs.
A few stories.
A wooden toy truck my father had sanded by hand before becoming too sick to finish the matching train set.
My hands were already shaking when Adrian opened the first letter.
It was my father’s handwriting.
No one could have copied it.
Adrian unfolded the page slowly and began reading aloud.
*”If you are reading this, kiddo, then I missed more of your life than I ever wanted to.”*
*”I am sorry for that first.”*
***He stopped. Cleared his throat. Started again.***
*”Your mother has always been stronger than anyone gives her credit for. You may not know that yet, but you will. She carried you before you were born, and she’ll carry you in a hundred ways after. I hate leaving her to do this without me.”*
I covered my mouth.
Adrian’s voice became rougher.
*”I asked my friend Thomas to help me with something after I’m gone. I wanted you to have one sign every year that someone was thinking about you. Not enough to spoil you. Just enough that on your birthday, no matter what else life was doing, you would know you were being remembered.”*
***Adrian blinked hard.***
*”I knew I would not get to watch you grow up. I knew there would be school pictures I would never see and birthdays I would never clap for and probably a time when you would wonder who is still in your corner. I could not stand the thought of you ever feeling forgotten.”*
*”So Thomas agreed to send a card each year. The money is small because this was never about the money. It was about remembering.”*
A broken sound escaped Adrian.
Half laugh.
Half sob.
I could barely breathe.
There were three more letters, written at different stages of my father’s illness.
In one, he described baby Adrian frowning in his sleep *”like he’s already disappointed in the state of the world.”*
In another, he told Adrian never to judge his mother by her worst day because she loved hard enough to shatter.
The final letter had been written closest to the end.
His handwriting shook across the page.
***”I am asking Thomas not to tell your mother.”***
*”Not because I want secrets between you, but because she has enough grief coming and I do not want her counting down these cards as one more loss. Let it be a kindness without weight. Let it be light until you are old enough to carry the truth.”*
*”By then, I hope the mystery made you smile.”*
*”By then, I hope your mother has laughed more than she cried.”*
*”By then, maybe you will both know that love can keep showing up long after a person is gone.”*
Adrian lowered the letter and stared at the table.
By then, I was crying openly.
Messy, breathless tears.
The kind that burn.
***”I thought…” I said, and then I could not finish.***
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