Chapter 18 - The Letter Diane SentDiane’s letter came eighteen months after the birthday dinner.
By then, the divorce was final.
Dad had moved into a small ranch house ten minutes from me. He painted the guest room yellow because Mia said yellow was “a friendly color.” Lucas helped him hang a bird feeder outside the kitchen window.
Diane had kept the big house for six months, then sold it after realizing empty rooms still required taxes.
I had not heard from her directly since the legal letter.
Then the envelope appeared.
Cream paper. Perfect handwriting.
Kristen,
I have had time to reflect.
I almost stopped reading there.
Not because I believed her.
Because I knew reflection, for Diane, usually meant finding a shinier mirror.
She wrote that she regretted “how events unfolded.” She said she had “felt excluded from decisions” around Dad’s birthday. She said she had “reacted poorly to feeling disrespected.”
She did not mention Lucas.
She did not mention Mia.
She did not mention the birdhouse.
Then came the real reason.
“I would like to retrieve several items from your father that were unfairly withheld during the divorce, including family photographs and certain keepsakes belonging to Elaine.”
My mother.
I read the sentence again.
Elaine.
Diane had hidden Mom’s letters in a garage for years, and now she wanted access to keepsakes.
I called Dad.
He came over immediately.
When he read the letter, his face hardened.
“She wants Elaine’s things?”
“That’s what it says.”
“She hated Elaine’s things.”
“I know.”
Dad folded the letter carefully.
“She doesn’t want them. She wants proof she can still reach in.”
“What do we do?”
He looked surprised by the question.
“We don’t answer.”
And we didn’t.
But the letter stirred something in me.
That weekend, Dad and I went through the last boxes from his garage. Not Diane’s boxes. Mom’s.
We found recipes. Scarves. A cracked ceramic angel I remembered from Christmas. A photo of Mom pregnant with me, laughing on the back porch.
At the bottom of one box was a small wooden bird ornament.
Blue.
With tiny flowers painted around the roof.
I stared.
Dad leaned closer.
“Oh my God,” he whispered.
On the back, in Mom’s handwriting, were the words:
Kristen, age 7.
I had made a birdhouse too.
I had forgotten.
Or grief had buried it.
My hands trembled.
Dad sat beside me on the garage floor.
“She kept it,” I said.
“Of course she did.”
I turned the ornament over again.
Blue paint. Tiny flowers.
Lucas and Mia had made their gift with no idea they were echoing mine.
Some love repeats itself until someone finally notices.
That Christmas, we hung the ornament near the top of our tree.
Lucas studied it.
“You made that?”
“I did.”
Mia beamed.
“So birdhouses are a family thing.”
May you like
Dad looked at the ornament, then at the children, then at me.
“Yes,” he said softly. “They are.”
