Chapter 12 - MILENA’S FIRST LETTER
Milena wrote to me three months after Thanksgiving.
Not Luke.
Me.
Angelo,
I believed one lie could buy time.
Then:
I believed time would make the truth less necessary.
Then:
Eventually I understood I was no longer protecting you from anything. I was protecting myself from your judgment.
Good.
Then the sentence I expected:
Everything I did was because I loved you.
I almost stopped reading.
But she continued:
That does not make it acceptable. Love was the reason I gave myself, not the permission I had.
Better.
Then she wrote about Grace.
I looked at her and saw every vulnerability I feared could attach itself to you: youth, class difference, scandal, pregnancy, unpredictability. I treated her like a risk instead of a person.
Then Luke.
When I knocked his plate down, I had already spent three years calling him something other than my grandson inside my own head.
There.
No excuse.
Then:
I am ashamed that the first truth he learned about me was accurate.
May you like
I did not answer.
Not yet.
