I was simply doing triage on my own strength, the way you learn to when you are the only adult in a house full of need, deciding what I could afford to keep spending and what I had to cut off to survive.

Hope, it turned out, was too expensive.

I could keep hoping Grayson would answer, or I could keep three babies alive, and I could not do both.

So I chose them, and I sealed the last letter, and I never wrote another, and I taught myself, over years, not to flinch when the mail came.

That Grayson read those words for the first time seven years later, in his mother’s dining room, with the whole cost of them already spent — that is a grief I would not wish on anyone, and it is one he earned honestly, and both of those are true.

Grayson read the fourth letter three times, in complete silence.