Chapter 5
“Vincent.”
“When you came home.”
“I did come home.”
“To Oak Park.”
“You know what I mean.”
My voice became quieter.
“No, actually. I don’t think I do anymore.”
He exhaled.
“Your father asked me not to give it to you while you were frightened, grieving, or angry.”
“My father has been dead three years.”
“I know.”
“Then why does his instruction somehow apply to every inconvenient moment in my life?”
“That isn’t what he meant.”
“You opened it?”
“No.”
I believed him.
Strangely, I did.
“Bring it to me.”
“Madison—”
“Bring me my father’s letter.”
“I can have it sent.”
“No.”
I looked at the documents spread across my grandmother’s kitchen table.
“All these years, everyone has decided what I should know. My father. You. Lawyers. Accountants. I’m done receiving my own life secondhand.”
Vincent said nothing.
Then:
“I’ll bring it.”
He arrived forty minutes later.
The envelope was cream-colored, aged slightly at the edges, my maiden name written across the front in my father’s handwriting.
Madison Bennett.
Not Carter.
Bennett.
My hands trembled.
Vincent stood near the front door.
“Do you want me to leave?”
I looked at him.
For once, he was not deciding.
He was asking.
“Yes.”
He nodded.
Then he turned toward the door.
“Vincent.”
He stopped.
“Did my father know about Vanessa?”
His back remained toward me.
“No.”
“Did he know you still loved her?”
This time the silence lasted longer.
Finally Vincent turned.
“I don’t know what I felt about Vanessa when I married you.”
The answer hurt.
But it was clean.
No disguise.
No excuse.
“And now?”
He looked toward the envelope in my hands.
“That answer belongs after you read what your father wrote.”
Then he left.
I sat alone at the kitchen table.
For ten full minutes, I could not open the envelope.
My father had been gone three years, but suddenly I could see him everywhere.
His dusty work boots by the back door.
His reading glasses halfway down his nose.
The way he called me Maddie only when nobody else was around.
Finally, I slid my finger beneath the seal.
Inside were six handwritten pages.
The first line made me stop.
My dearest Maddie,
If you are reading this because your first child has arrived, then somewhere in this world there is a little person I would have given anything to meet.
Tears blurred the words.
I pressed my hand to my mouth.
Then I continued.
Your mother will tell you I was never good at serious conversations. She is right. So I am doing what cowardly fathers have done for centuries: writing the things I was afraid I would not know how to say aloud.
I laughed through my tears.
That sounded exactly like him.
Then I reached the third paragraph.
And everything changed.
I know your marriage to Vincent did not begin the way you once imagined marriage would begin.
You believed our families introduced you because of business.
That is only partly true.
Vincent came to me first.
I stopped.
Read it again.
Vincent came to me first.
My father continued.
He asked for permission to court you.
Not marry you.
Court you.
I nearly dropped the page.
My father wrote that Vincent had visited his office seven months before our families ever arranged the first dinner.
Seven months.
He had apparently asked my father not to tell me.
“He thinks too much before he feels,” my father had written. “And you feel too much before you think. I told him that combination would either make a strong marriage or exhaust you both.”
A shaky laugh escaped me.
Then I read the next lines.
Vincent told me there had been someone before you, someone he believed he had once loved deeply. He was honest about that. I told him a person may carry an old love without understanding whether he misses the person or merely the person he once was.
My eyes stopped moving.
My father had known Vanessa existed.
Not her name.
But enough.
There was more.
A great deal more.
About the company.
About the assets.
About why my father had insisted I own something no husband could quietly remove from beneath me.
Then, on the final page, he wrote:
Do not stay with any man because I approved of him.
Do not leave any man because I once trusted him.
Those are decisions I have no right to make for the woman you became after I was gone.
But there is something you should know about Vincent.
Three days before he asked my permission to court you, I asked him one question.
“If Madison never loves you, what will you do?”
He answered, “Make sure she never regrets trusting me.”
My vision blurred completely.
Because suddenly the question haunting me was no longer whether Vincent Carter had ever loved Vanessa Reed.
May you like
It was whether somewhere between asking my father for permission to court me and leaving me alone in that hospital, Vincent had fallen in love with me—
and simply never learned how to say it.
