Skip to content 
The letters that never arrived
I sat down on the floor because my legs wouldn’t support me. Leo settled down beside me, and I opened the first envelope with trembling hands. Andrew asked me not to believe he had abandoned me; he promised he was trying to come back.
In another letter he wrote that he didn’t know how to communicate with me, that his mother insisted I hated him. In a third, he imagined our baby: “If it’s a boy, I hope he laughs like you laugh when you’re very happy . “
And then, inside a card addressed to our son, I read some lines that broke my heart: “I don’t know if you’ll ever see this. But if your mother tells you she loved you, believe her with all your soul . “
The lie that cost eighteen years
Gwen tearfully explained what she had discovered after her mother’s death the previous winter. She hadn’t known about the letters back then. She was away at university, and her family kept her in the dark. Andrew had called her in despair when his parents forced him to move out, telling her that I was pregnant and that his mother wouldn’t let him come back.
Andrew’s mother had intercepted every letter, every card, every attempt at contact. She made her son believe I hated him, and she made me believe he had run away. She stole eighteen years of our lives with a persistent lie.