Chapter 16 - THE LETTER I STILL COULDN’T OPENThree months after I moved into Aunt Lena’s house, my father’s letter was still inside the top drawer of my desk.

Unopened.

Not because I didn’t care what he wrote.

Because I cared too much.

Every time I touched the envelope, I heard his old voice in my head.

Maya gets emotional.

Maya exaggerates.

Maya remembers things differently when she’s upset.

Those sentences had followed me for nearly two years.

They were how my parents explained every warning I tried to give about my younger brother, Jonah.

They were how teachers learned not to take me seriously.

How relatives smiled sympathetically when I became angry.

How my mother convinced everyone I needed “space” after the accident.

The accident.

That was what they still called it.

A wet November road.

Jonah driving our mother’s SUV even though he was thirteen.

A cyclist thrown into a ditch.

My parents arriving before police.

My father moving Jonah into the passenger seat.

My mother telling me, very quietly:

“You will say you were driving.”

I refused.

So they invented a different story.

Maya had been anxious.

Maya had been unstable.

Maya was angry at Jonah.

By midnight, my parents had transformed me from the only witness into the least reliable person in the family.

The cyclist survived.

Barely.

The truth eventually came out because of traffic-camera timing, vehicle data, and a neighbor who saw my father move Jonah after the crash.

Now Jonah lived temporarily with our grandmother while family court and therapists worked out what came next.

My parents lived separately.

I lived with Aunt Lena.

And my father wrote letters.

I never answered.

That morning, Lena knocked on my bedroom door.

“You don’t have to read it.”

“I know.”

“You also don’t have to keep it.”

“I know.”

She looked at the envelope.

“You could make me hold it.”

I almost smiled.

“I’m not five.”

“No. Five-year-olds are easier. They can be bribed with pancakes.”

I finally laughed.

Then my phone buzzed.

A message from Jonah.

Can I tell you something about that night?

I stared at it.

Another message appeared.

Something Dad still doesn’t know I remember.

The letter suddenly stopped mattering.

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For the moment.

Because my brother—the person everyone had protected by destroying my credibility—was finally asking to speak.