Chapter 13 - The Letter from the Shadows
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I held the letter in my hands for a long time before reading it. The ink was dark blue, the handwriting deliberate and precise.
Dear Elowen,
I know you have every reason to throw this letter into your fireplace without reading a single word. If you do, I won't blame you.
I am not writing this to ask for your money back. I am not writing this to ask you to return to me. I know the man you left six months ago was a hollow, arrogant shell who didn't deserve your grace or your silence.
After the gala, when the noise cleared and I was sitting alone in that massive, empty kitchen, I looked at the floor where you used to stand. For eight years, I thought I was building an empire. It took losing everything for me to realize that I hadn't built anything—you had held up the walls while I took the applause.
Over the last four months, I have been working with a local non-profit foundation that builds timber-frame housing for homeless veterans. I pick up hammers. I haul lumber. I work under supervisors who don't know my last name and wouldn't care if they did.
I started seeing a therapist twice a week. We talk a lot about my father, about my mother’s expectations, but mostly, we talk about how I turned the woman who loved me into a ghost in her own home.
I wrote a formal apology to Maya Chen last week. She was always smarter than me, Elowen. You saw it eleven years ago; I was too insecure to admit it.
I spent years believing that success meant entering rooms where powerful people knew my name. I understand now that real success is becoming someone the people closest to you can trust when nobody else is watching.
You do not owe me an answer. You do not owe me forgiveness. I only wanted you to know that losing you finally forced me to meet the man I should have been all along.
Sincerely,
Weston.
I folded the paper slowly, holding it against my chest as rainy drops pattered against the glass window.
A tear escaped the corner of my eye, trailing down my cheek.
May you like
I wasn't crying because I missed him. I was crying for the young girl I had been eight years ago—the girl who had loved him so fiercely, hoping that one day he would see her.
He had finally seen her. But the cost had been catastrophic.
