And right next to it was a second note.

In his handwriting.

Dated the same night.”

I stood in row twelve with grease still under my fingernails from the store and twenty-two years rising up in my throat, and I understood that the thing I had written to myself in the dark, the promise I had made and folded away and never looked at because I had chosen to become it instead of remember it — my daughters had found it.

They had found the whole of me in a cigar box, and they had understood it, and they had carried it up onto that stage.

Chapter 16 — The Note I Wrote Back