Susan put her hand over the envelope.
“Before you open this, there’s something I need to say.”
“What did you do?”
Her face crumpled.
“I loved him too.”
I stopped breathing.
“No.”
“For a long time.”
“No.”
“Linda—”
“Don’t.”
Thirty-seven years of memories began rearranging themselves in my head.
Susan in my kitchen.
Susan knowing Michael’s coffee.
Susan entering without knocking.
Susan sitting beside him at birthdays.
Susan helping me choose his funeral clothes.
I looked at the envelope.
“How long?”
She started crying.
“Seventeen years.”
I slapped my hand over my mouth.
Seventeen.
Not one mistake.
Not one drunken night.
A second life.
“You were sleeping with my husband for seventeen years?”
Susan shook her head.
“That isn’t the whole truth.”
I laughed because the alternative was screaming.
“What could possibly make that sentence worse?”
She lifted her hand from Michael’s envelope.
“Open it.”
I tore it open.
Inside was a letter.
And underneath it, a photograph.
Michael was standing beside Susan.
Much younger.
Between them was a little girl I had never seen before.
On the back, in Michael’s handwriting, were three words:
Our daughter, Emily.
I looked at Susan.
She didn’t move.
Then someone knocked on the hotel door.
Susan wiped her face.
“She’s here.”
Part 2: Susan opened the door.
A woman in her early twenties stood in the hallway holding the same photograph I had just pulled from Michael’s envelope.
She had Susan’s mouth.
But Michael’s eyes.
My husband’s eyes.
The woman looked at me and immediately started crying.
“You’re Linda.”
I couldn’t answer.
Susan whispered, “This is Emily.”
The room tilted.
Emily did not step toward me.
She simply held out a second envelope.
“Michael left this with me before he got sick. He said I wasn’t allowed to give it to you until Mom told you everything herself.”
Mom.
Susan.
My best friend.
Michael’s secret partner.
Mother of his daughter.
I looked at Susan.
“You knew he was dying?”
She nodded.
“And you both decided when I deserved the truth?”
Susan flinched.
Then Emily said something that stopped me before I could tear Michael’s second letter in half.
“He didn’t leave it because he wanted forgiveness.”
She placed the envelope in my hand.
“He left it because there’s something in his will you still don’t know.”
