Always yours,
Rachel
The room was silent when Amelia finished.
Gavin stared at the letter as if Rachel might appear between the lines.
“She was trying,” he whispered.
“Yes,” Amelia said.
“She died thinking I’d never know.”
Denise, standing near the wall, wiped her eyes.
Gavin pressed his cuffed hands to his face.
For five years, grief had been a locked room inside him. He had mourned Rachel as his wife, as Chloe’s mother, as the woman he could not bury properly. Now another grief opened beneath it.
Rachel had not abandoned the fight.
She had been fighting beside him from the beginning.
He just had not known.
When Chloe visited that afternoon, Gavin told her about the letter.
Not all the details. Not the frightening parts. But enough.
“Mommy left us clues,” he said.
Chloe’s eyes grew wide. “Like a treasure hunt?”
Gavin smiled through tears. “Kind of.”
