And she thought it, clearly and soberly, at eighteen, and she planned around it, and she used her dying breath to try to build a wall of secrecy around her son thick enough to keep him safe from his own father.

I had spent ten years unknowingly maintaining that wall.

Reading her letter, I finally understood what it had been for, and the understanding filled me with a grief and a fury that I knew, even then, were not going to let me simply put the letter back in the box and go on as before.

Chapter 19 — Ninety-Nine Point Nine Nine

Raise him with the same love you gave me, the letter said, in its final lines.