“I told her the truth would destroy you,” she said quietly. “I told her if she loved you, she should build the life anyway. That Evie could be your second chance.”

“That wasn’t protection,” Aunt Marlene said firmly. “That was control.”

“You had no right,” I said, my voice breaking.

“I was trying to protect what little you had left,” my mother whispered.

“You didn’t protect anything.”

My voice came out lower than I intended, rough with something I couldn’t smooth over.

“And I can understand how Jess might’ve been feeling,” I went on. “Fear. Guilt. Being overwhelmed. I get all of that.”

I glanced down at Evie—small, warm, trusting against me—and my throat tightened.

“But she walked away from her child,” I said evenly. “No matter what she felt, that doesn’t justify it.”

My mother’s eyes filled with tears. “She told me she wouldn’t take Evie. She swore she wouldn’t. She said Evie looked at you like you hung the stars in the sky, and she couldn’t steal that from you.”

“And you let a promise take the place of the truth.”

Aunt Marlene moved toward the door, picked up her purse, then stopped. She looked back at my mother, her disappointment unmistakable.

“I’m deeply ashamed of you, Addison. Truly.”

My mother exhaled shakily as her sister left the house.

That night, while Evie slept peacefully beside me, I lay awake in the dark, listening to her steady breathing. The house felt wrong—too empty without Jess’s off-key humming, too quiet without the soft scuff of her slippers across the floor.

I don’t know why I opened my nightstand drawer. Maybe I needed something familiar. Inside were old receipts and dog-eared paperbacks.

That’s when I found it.

Folded inside my copy of The Things They Carried was another note.

Callum,

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