Chapter 4 - Twenty-Six Years of LettersHe drove her the rest of the way to the Hendersons' barn, because there was nothing else to do with his hands or his car or the enormous, roaring silence in his chest, and along the way, in pieces, she told him the rest.
She'd found out she was pregnant three weeks after Marguerite Calloway paid her a visit at the diner where she worked, sliding an envelope across the counter with fifteen thousand dollars in it and a very clear explanation of what would happen to Elena's mother's mortgage, her younger sister's scholarship, and her own reputation in a small town if she didn't take the money and disappear before Weston's twenty-fourth birthday.
Elena hadn't known about the baby yet when she took the money. She found out two weeks after she'd already left, already three towns away, already too proud and too frightened to come back and admit she'd sold her own future for fifteen thousand dollars and a bus ticket.
"I wrote to you," she said, staring straight ahead through the windshield. "Six months in, once I started showing enough that I couldn't ignore it anymore. I wrote to the house. I wrote to the office. I even wrote to your mother directly, once, out of desperation, asking her to at least tell you the truth and let you decide what you wanted to do."
"I never got any letters."
"I know that now." Her voice was flat, exhausted, twenty-six years past the capacity for outrage. "I found out about eight years ago, actually. Marco tracked down an old housekeeper who used to work for your family — Delphine, I think her name was — and she told him your mother had intercepted every piece of mail addressed to you from anyone with my last name for almost three years. She told him your mother used to say, quote, 'Some mistakes are cheaper to bury than to raise.'"
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Weston's hands tightened on the steering wheel until his knuckles went white.
"Marco grew up angry about it," Elena continued. "Angrier than I ever let myself get, honestly. He used to say he was going to march up to your office someday and introduce himself. I told him not to. I told him it wouldn't change anything, that some doors, once they're closed for that long, aren't worth the energy it takes to open them again." She glanced at Ivy in the rearview mirror, buckled into the backseat, humming to herself. "I was wrong about that too, I suppose. I should have let him go."
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