And she wrote that she’d started putting money aside the only way she could, a little at a time, so that someday I’d have something back.

There were lines in that letter I have since read so many times I know them by heart.

She wrote that she’d watched me grow up steady and kind and hardworking, and that she was proud of me in a way she’d never found the right moment to say aloud.

She wrote that she knew I thought she’d been weak, and that she didn’t blame me for it, and that she hoped this letter might change my mind a little, though she’d understand if it didn’t.

She wrote that a mother is only ever as free as her worst fear for her children, and that her worst fear had always been that I’d go through my whole life believing the world had simply cheated me — when the truth was that I’d been robbed by a man who was meant to look after me, and that there was a difference between bad luck and betrayal, and the difference mattered, and she’d wanted me to know it before she was gone even if the knowing came late.