Chapter 5 - Bringing Everyone Home
I drove back to Diana and Addie the next day.
We sat around their kitchen table and I told them all of it — my sister, the diary, what Walter had done and why he'd buried it, and what it meant for every one of us now.
Diana cried. Addie sat dead still, staring at the tabletop, until she finally lifted her eyes to me, her face full of shock and something close to hurt.
"Diana," I said. "You're my sister's daughter." I turned to the girl. "And that makes you my great-niece, Addie."
For a moment nobody said anything.
Then Addie slid off her chair, crossed the little kitchen, and put both arms around me without a word.
I held her and thought about Walter — the weight of the thing he'd hauled alone, and the quiet way he'd hauled it.
My husband hadn't just kept a secret. He'd kept a family whole. Two of them.
"He really was something," Addie said into my shoulder.
May you like
"Yes," I said, my cheek against her hair. "He really was."
Walter carried it alone for sixty-five years so that nobody would get hurt. And in the end, the secret he kept was the thing that brought us all home.
