My stepdad raised me after I lost my mother — just hours before he d*ed, he gripped my hand and whispered, “There’s something I’ve hidden from you your entire life.”

“That’s not possible,” I said.

“Frank didn’t believe it either.

Not at first.”

“Gerald loved Frank.

They were close — they were friends long before Frank married Susan.”

“Yes,” Miriam said quietly.

“They were.”

Something in her tone made me go cold.

“Open the envelope, Claire.”

I opened it.

Frank’s handwriting covered four pages, front and back.

His letters were shakier than I remembered — the illness had already been in his hands when he wrote this — but the words were precise.

Deliberate.

The handwriting of a man who knew he was writing something that would outlast him.

I read.

Frank had met Catherine Reyes at twenty-three.

Gerald Marsh had introduced them — Gerald, who was two years older, who had grown up with Frank, who had been the best man at their wedding.

What Frank had not known, not then, was that Gerald had been in love with Catherine first.