That night, sleep wouldn’t come. Gerald kept seeing Martha’s face, hearing the way her voice had cracked with fear.
Curiosity clawed at him until he couldn’t bear it anymore. Around midnight, he gave up trying to sleep.
He went to the garage, grabbed his old bolt cutters, and climbed the attic stairs one more time. The lock snapped easier than he expected.
His hands trembled as he lifted the heavy lid. What he saw nearly buckled his knees.
The trunk was filled with letters. Hundreds of them, neatly bundled with faded ribbons and organized by date.
The earliest were from 1966—the year Martha and Gerald had married. The most recent were from the late 1970s.
None of the letters were from Gerald.
A Name He’d Never Heard
Every envelope was addressed to Martha. Every single one was signed by the same name: Daniel.
With shaking hands, Gerald opened one of the oldest letters and read by flashlight. It began “My dearest Martha” and spoke of longing, of counting days until he could return home.
Then he reached the ending. Every letter ended the same way: “I’ll come for you and our son when the time is right. All my love, Daniel.”
Our son?
Gerald’s chest felt like it had caved in. He sank onto an old crate and forced himself to read more.
The letters described a secret life he never knew existed. Daniel wrote about watching from afar, about seeing “little James” grow.
About how proud he was of the boy.
James. The name jumped off the page again and again until Gerald’s vision blurred.
My James, he thought. The son I taught to throw a baseball. The boy who shadowed me in the garage. The man I walked down the aisle at his wedding.
These letters were about his son.
