Chapter 21 - Evelina’s Apology
Evelina wrote Hattie a letter during her second year of probation.
Dr. Cole reviewed it.
I reviewed it.
Hattie was eight by then.
We asked whether she wanted to read it.
“No.”
So we stored it.
At nine:
“Do you still have?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe.”
Two more months.
Then she chose.
Evelina wrote:
Hattie,
At the Carver dinner, I grabbed your arm and slapped your face.
Direct.
“You lost a baby tooth because I hit you.”
Direct.
“I said you needed to learn your place.”
There.
“I also threatened to tell you who your ‘real mother’ was.”
Hattie stopped reading at the quotation marks.
“Why quotes?”
“Because Evelina is acknowledging the phrase was wrong.”
She continued.
“I knew you were adopted because your father trusted me with private information. I used that information to hurt you and him.”
Then:
“I believed being born into a family made someone’s place more secure than being adopted into it.”
No softening.
“That belief came from painful things in my own childhood, but those experiences did not give me the right to repeat the same cruelty toward you.”
Hattie read slower.
Then:
“Mara was your mother. June is your birth mother. I had no right to use either woman to make you feel less like your father’s daughter.”
That was the line.
At the end:
“You do not owe me forgiveness or contact.”
Hattie put the letter down.
“Do I forgive?”
I almost answered.
Stopped.
“That’s yours.”
“What if I don’t know?”
“Then you don’t know.”
She folded it.
“Can keep?”
“Yes.”
She kept it for a year.
Then one day it disappeared from the drawer.
I asked nothing.
Her story.
May you like
Her choice.
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