My throat closed.
That shirt.
I remembered it.
Dad had bought it for me that summer.
“He took you fishing,” Frank said. “Your mom sat about sixty yards away.”
I couldn’t speak.
“She watched you for nearly two hours.”
“Why?”
“Because she wanted to know whether seeing you would help her get better.”
“And?”
Frank’s voice fell.
“It made things worse.”
I looked back at the letter.
My mother described watching me laugh while Dad struggled with a fishing line. She had wanted to run to me. Hold me. Tell me she was alive.
Instead, she had suffered another episode that night.
Afterward, she made Dad promise something terrible.
Do not let him build his life around waiting for me.
Tears dropped onto the paper.
At the end, she wrote:
Your father did not take you from me. I asked him to protect you from the uncertainty of me.
