I think that was the only way he knew how to be your father, at the end.

To make sure the truth was waiting for you where you couldn’t buy your way around it.” What I did not tell Rhett, because it was mine and not his, was what those two years of letters had meant to me.

I had been a long time alone by then — proud of it, mostly, and competent at it, but alone in the particular way of a person who has learned not to expect help and so has stopped being able to receive it.

And into that came, every few weeks, an envelope in a shaking old hand, addressed to a post office box on a base half a country away.