📖 Part 5: What She Chose to Keep
Elise returned to Maple Hill the next morning.
The rain had cleared, but the air still smelled like wet soil and pine bark. She pulled into the driveway slowly, her hands loose on the wheel, the sun slanting through the trees just like it had in the summers of her childhood.
The house looked the same.
But something inside her had shifted.
Lena ran out barefoot, arms open, and Elise knelt to hug her, pressing her face into the soft warmth of her daughter’s hair. For a moment, Elise didn’t speak. She just held her — tightly, completely — the way she wished someone had once held her when her world had quietly broken.
Later that night, after dinner and dishes and the small rituals that made life feel ordinary again, Elise lit a fire in the living room hearth. Lena curled up beside her, head on her mother’s shoulder.
“Mom,” she asked, “who was the man in that photo you were holding yesterday?”
Elise didn’t answer right away.
She walked to the cabinet where she had placed the letters, all neatly restacked. From the top of the pile, she pulled one. The one with the drawing of a tree and the smudged postmark from Quảng Ngãi.
She handed it to Lena.
“That,” Elise said softly, “was someone I loved a long time ago. Before I even knew what love really meant.”
Lena opened the envelope with reverent fingers. “Did he die?”
Elise nodded.
“In a way,” she said, “but not all at once. He came home, but the war never really let him go.”
Lena looked up. “Was he nice?”
“The kindest person I’ve ever known,” Elise said. “He once gave me his only blanket because I forgot mine on a camping trip. He wrote me poems. He could fix anything. Except… the way the world saw him.”
Lena blinked. “Did Grandma know?”
“Yes,” Elise said, her voice steady now. “And she was afraid. Not of him — but of what he carried.”
They sat in silence for a moment. The fire cracked.
Then Elise said, “You know, we don’t always get to finish the stories we start. Sometimes someone else closes the book for us. But if you’re lucky — just a little lucky — you get to tell the story again, in your own way.”
Lena reached for another letter.
“Can I read more?”
Elise smiled.
“Yes, baby. But read them slow. They were meant for someone who waited a long time.”
That night, Elise wrote something for herself.
A single-page letter. Not to Tom. Not to her mother. But to the girl she used to be — the one who sat on the swing barefoot, waiting for someone who never got the chance to come home.
“I forgive you.
For trusting silence. For loving quietly. For losing your voice too young.
You loved him, and it mattered — even if no one knew.
And now someone does.”
She folded it gently, slid it into the envelope, and placed it alongside the others.
Then she went to bed.
And for the first time in a long, long while, she dreamed without regret.
