Caleb’s POV
Serena is sitting cross-legged on her bed when I find her, a locket pressed against her collarbone and traces of dried tears on her cheeks.
She has been crying, but the redness around her eyes carries a softness I do not usually see after tears — not grief, not anger. Relief, maybe.
The kind that comes from finally hearing what you needed to hear from someone who can no longer say it out loud.
She looks at the envelope in my hand, then at my face, and the softness shifts into concern.
"I want you with me when I do," I tell her again, because the words felt true downstairs and they feel truer now.
"Then sit down." She unfolds her legs and pats the mattress beside her. "Whatever is in there, we open it together."
I lower myself onto the edge of her bed and hold the envelope between both hands. It weighs almost nothing. Thin, sealed with a careless lick, no return address.
Simon handed it to me across a diner table with the stripped-down exhaustion of a man who has finally run out of masks.
"My hands are shaking," I say, and it comes out like a confession.
Serena reaches over and wraps her fingers around my wrist. Her thumb presses against my pulse point, steady and warm. "Mine would be too. That does not make you weak — it makes you human."
I tear the seal before I can talk myself out of it. The flap gives easily, cheap adhesive on cheap paper, and I tilt the envelope until its contents slide out onto the bedspread between us.
Two documents. Folded together, creased from years in a jacket pocket or a glove compartment or wherever Simon kept the things he was not ready to surrender.
I unfold them and my breath stops.
Divorce papers. The same papers my mother described in the kitchen that night when she told me the truth about why Simon left — the documents he stole on his way out the door, the ones she thought were gone forever.
They are signed.
Simon's signature sits on the line at the bottom of the last page, sharp and angular, pressed so hard into the paper that the ink bled through to the other side. And beside the signature, a date.
Three years ago. The exact day he walked out.
"Caleb." Serena's voice is barely above a whisper. "He signed them before he left."
"He signed them," I repeat, because the words do not make sense yet. "He signed them and then he took them with him."
The understanding arrives slowly, light touching one surface at a time until the whole picture becomes visible. Simon signed the divorce papers the day he disappeared.
He could have left them on the counter. He could have mailed them. He could have done the single decent thing that would have set my mother free three years earlier than tonight.
Instead, he folded them into his pocket and carried them across state lines. He held them hostage the way he held everything — not because he wanted them, but because he wanted the power of withholding them.
And now he is letting go.
"There is a note," Serena says softly, pointing to a smaller piece of paper that slipped out with the documents. It landed face-down on the comforter, and I reach for it fast, because waiting only makes it harder.
Simon's handwriting. I would recognize it anywhere, the messy slant of a man who never had the patience for legibility. The note is short, written in the blue ink of a cheap ballpoint pen.
‘I was never going to be the father you needed. I am sorry it took me this long to stop pretending otherwise.’
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