Around midnight, I went to the garage, grabbed my bolt cutters, and returned to the attic.
The lock snapped easily.
My hands shook as I lifted the lid.
Inside were hundreds of letters, tied neatly with faded ribbons and sorted by date. The earliest were from 1966—the year Martha and I married. The latest were from the late 1970s.
They were all addressed to Martha.
All signed by someone named Daniel.
I picked one up and read:
“My dearest Martha,”
He wrote about missing her, about counting the days until he could return.
But the ending froze me:
“I’ll come for you and our son when the time is right. All my love, Daniel.”
Our son?
I felt like I’d been hit in the chest.
I read more.
The letters spoke of a child—of watching him grow from afar, of pride in “little James.”
James. My son.
The boy I had raised.
The next day, I confronted Martha.
“Martha, who the hell is Daniel? What son is he talking about?”
She broke down.
Before me, before our marriage, she had been engaged to Daniel. He was drafted in early 1966. Shortly after, she discovered she was pregnant.
“He begged me to wait for him,” she said. “But then his plane went down. Everyone said he was dead.”
We met soon after. We married quickly. I had always believed James was premature.
He wasn’t.
