I Married My Terminally I:ll First Love as Her Dy:ing Wish

I know I’m asking something enormous of you, Elias. I know I don’t have any right left to ask you for anything at all, after everything I took from both of us by staying silent this long. But she has your laugh. She has your stubbornness, and your terrible taste in old country music, and your exact same habit of tapping her foot when she’s thinking hard about something. I couldn’t give her a mother much longer. I’m asking you, with whatever’s left of the love I never actually stopped carrying for you these past ten years, to give her a father instead.

I couldn’t give her a mother much longer. I’m asking you to give her a father instead.

I’m sorry it took me dying to find the courage I should have found a decade ago. I hope, somehow, you can forgive me enough to love her anyway.

All my love, always,

Naomi

I sat at that kitchen table until the sun came up, the letter and the photograph spread out in front of me, trying to make sense of ten years of silence finally collapsing into a single, impossible truth.

I had a daughter. Nine years old. Living three towns over with a woman I’d met exactly once, for less than thirty seconds, at my own wife’s funeral.

I had a daughter.

I called the number written at the bottom of the letter’s final page around eight that morning, hands still unsteady, voice barely holding together.

“This is Renata,” the woman answered.

“This is Elias,” I said. “Naomi’s husband. I read the letter.”

There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

“I’ve been waiting for this call for eight months,” Renata said, quiet. “Ever since Naomi got her diagnosis and started putting all of this together. I’ll be honest with you, Elias — I told her more than once she needed to tell you herself, long before it ever got to this point. She was scared you’d hate her for the years she took from both of you.”