Chapter 26
TWENTY-SIX
LEXI
Rory Grady
I left the letters in your mailbox.
Me
So I can give them back to him?
So you can read them too.
After you do, let’s talk.
I wait until I have a day off, a week later, before I dare let myself sink into the letters.
After doing my weekly watering routine, talking to every one of my plants as I spritz, water, or don’t on my way by, I close all of the shades.
Partly so no one sees me if those fucking tears come back, but also because it feels right to do this in the dark.
Sunlight streaming in while I revisit some of the deepest pain my family has felt, it just feels off.
Wrapping my silk robe I always wear when I’m home alone tighter around my middle, I bring the packet to the coffee table nestled among the plush velvety furniture of my living room and take a seat, the couch swallowing my ass.
After a quick mental back and forth, I decide to start from the beginning and read them through in sequence. That’s probably what Rory did, and I want to be prepared for whatever she’ll throw at me when that talk comes.
The paper rips in the middle when I unfold it like I would do to normal mail.
“Fuck,” I whisper, trying to press the torn edges back together.
I can still read it, but I need to be more delicate with them.
Fifteen years of pain is enough time for all of us to sustain damage easily, I guess.
My eyes fly to the top of the page, and I soak in the words that feel like a part of our past.
Rory,
You haven’t been answering my calls or texts, so I figure maybe a letter will get to you. If you don’t rip it up or burn it before you hear me out.
Dove, you have every right to be angry with me. I wasn’t a good role model for a husband, but I tried to be the best father I could be all these years, even if my heart wasn’t with your mother.
It was always with you and your sister.
Please call me. I want to see you.
Love,
Dad
Hell, my eyes are already prickling.
The dry edges of the paper scrape against the content of the letter as I fold it back up and lay it to the side, picking up the next one, seeing it was dated just a week or so after the first.
Rory,
Alexis tells me you’ve left. She says Wyatt Grady thinks you moved away.
I can only hope you’re using mail forwarding, otherwise this letter won’t find you.
Or maybe you’re just on a sabbatical, clearing your head, and this letter will be waiting for you when you come back home.
You’ve always needed something to help clear your mind for you, it’s so busy when you’re left to your own devices.
Sometimes, when I stand close to you, I wonder if I’ll be able to hear it as you’re thinking yourself into overdrive.
Like a car engine, you’re just pedal to the medal, zero to sixty in a second flat.
There are days I think it’d be easier if you were more like me, or your sister. One look at our faces, and you know just what we’re thinking. Maybe if you blew up at me, we could start moving past this.
You and your mother, though, you hold your cards close to your chest until you’re ready for everyone else to know what’s on your mind.
I just hope you decide to let me know what’s on your mind and you don’t shut me out for good over this.
I’m sorry for the way my actions hurt you and your sister.
I understand if you never forgive me. But I hope you keep me in your life anyway.
Love,
Dad
My mind takes me back to those first times I saw him after Mom kicked him out. It was tough. I was only twenty-five or so, barely had any control over my sharp tongue, if I even do now.
I said some harsh things and didn’t hold back on what I thought of what he did to Mom and our family.
I think it was the second time I saw him after he moved out that I told him about Rory.
But never once, in all the times I saw him since he left, did he ever tell me he’d been writing her letters.
Fingers going numb, I quickly reach for the next one, leaning back with it, forgetting to keep the tears from rolling past the rim of my eyelids.
Rory,
Your phone number stopped working. Maybe I broke it by leaving too many voicemails these past few weeks.
Apparently you haven’t come back yet, so if you really did get a new address somewhere, maybe you got yourself a new phone number to go along with it.
I miss you, Dove. I can only imagine how much your mama misses you too. Her heart was split open enough by what I did to her. Your sister’s, too, for that matter.
Please don’t punish them for my mistakes. I did that enough already.
And that poor Grady boy, Lexi tells me the word around town is he’s a shell of a man. He loves you in a way I never could your mother. Sounds like he isn’t doing too good without you.
If you don’t want to hear from me, I can stop trying to contact you. But for their sakes, please don’t cut everyone else out. I deserve it. They don’t.
You’re the center of their world, Dove.
Without you, I worry about all of them.
Love,
Dad
It takes hours to go through the letters, one by one, rereading, staining some of the aging paper with my tears.
By the time I get to the bottom of the stack, my eyes are puffy, and my heart is raw.
There are just two letters left. Slowly, I open the second to last.
Rory,
Well, pretty sure your mail forwarding would have expired by now. If you even had it to begin with.
I just can’t bring myself to stop writing to you. Every letter gives me a nugget of fresh hope that maybe this is the one that will change your mind. It’ll be the one that convinces you to respond to me.
I’ll keep writing you forever if it might bring you back to me.
Even if every envelope that goes unanswered crushes something inside of me.
These letters have helped me process things in my own way, which is kind of ironic. I feel like you’d be mad about that. Say something sassy about how I don’t deserve to process and heal from this.
But when I started writing you, I was selfish. I didn’t want to lose my daughter. I knew I’d hurt you, but I don’t think I realized how much.
With every passing week and month, I’ve seen more and more what my cheating on your mother must’ve done to you, and the way it must’ve hit you deep for you to react the way you have.
You’ve helped me accept some responsibility for my actions, whether you meant to or not. And I’ve come to realize that I might not ever win your love or trust back. I just don’t want to have fucked it all up for any other man in your life either.
If hearing me say I messed up and I’m sorry does anything at all to help you, I’ll keep doing it.
Even if you don’t ever accept those words from me.
Nobody is perfect, but I’m a weaker man than I’m proud to admit. Temptation has always been my downfall, which isn’t an easy thing to admit to your daughter.
Daddies are supposed to be their daughters’ heroes.
I’m sorry I couldn’t be yours forever.
Your strength makes you my hero now, Dove.
Love,
Dad
The very last letter is in a different envelope than all the rest.
My heart lodges in my throat, a gasp catching there when I take in a scrawl I haven’t seen in almost three years.
My eyes blur as I recognize it, and I handle it with the gentlest care my shaking hands are capable of, untucking the envelope and pulling the lined paper out.
It’s the shortest letter yet, but my eyes savor each and every stroke of her pen.
Asshole,
Rory left town right after you did.
I thought she might be back by now, but it’s been a year and I’m starting to think she’s serious about it.
For what it’s worth, if she came back tomorrow, I might give her your letters and not use them for tinder.
Only because I think she needs to hear from her daddy, not because you deserve time from any of us.
But because you might have hurt her worst of all and I’m not sure anyone else but you can fix it.
So stop writing letters.
No one is reading them.
Your faithful ex-wife,
Laura Lee
When I’ve re-read that one over and over again until I have it memorized, I lie back, clutching it to my chest, shaking with emotion.
Reliving the pain to our family, first from my dad, then from Rory was bad enough. But to see it through not only my father’s eyes, the way he was so concerned for me, for Wyatt, for Mom?
He put aside his own pain, the way I know he mourned, losing a daughter, because he knew the rest of us wouldn’t be okay without her. I don’t think he was, either, but he was willing to live with that.
My heart cracks open, hating her for running away and kicking us all out of her life. All the years with Mom wasted because she ran. The damage she did to the love of her life. To me.
But at least she came back to us.
Dad is still paying.
Top it off with the unexpected hit of my mom’s handwriting, hearing her come through the inked pages like that. It was a blessing to hear from her one more time, to feel her sass him from the past, it pulls a thick, watery laugh through the tears.
It’s so her.
I’m left reeling, devastated by seeing the damage from perspectives I never have before, and raw from all of it.
It takes days to recover from the emotional hit. But eventually, I send my sister a text.
Me
I’d like to meet.
Her response is instantaneous.
Rory Grady
Tell me where, I’ll be there.
Rory shows up early, because of course she does. She’s perfect like that.
While I’m still on my knees, sweating in the dirt, tending to my neglected garden on the side of my cottage—half for my mental health, half for the sake of my plant babies—I hear her heels clack along the stone pathway, making her way up to me.
Running a diner takes a lot more out of my schedule than a few shifts a week at the grocery store. Guess a few other distractions have stolen my attention away from my poor plants too.
My flowers look more like a jungle, overtaken by weeds and being suffocated out by creepers.
But hey, at least I’ll have a lot more time to work on it again once I lose the restaurant.
Once Wilder is gone.