“Why didn’t he give them to you?” I asked.
For a moment, she didn’t answer.
Then she smiled sadly — the kind of smile people wear when memory hurts more than they expected.
“Because your father could never say things out loud.”
One by one, she began opening them.
The first letter was dated only three months after their wedding.
Inside, my father had written about how terrified he was of failing as a husband. How he worried he wasn’t good enough for her. How every time they argued, he stayed silent because he feared saying the wrong thing and losing her.
In another letter, written after I was born, he described holding me for the first time in the hospital.
“I’ve never been more afraid in my life,” he wrote. “Not because of the responsibility. Because now I have something I can’t survive losing.”
By then, all of us were crying.
Because the man we knew was loving in practical ways, not emotional ones. He fixed things. Paid bills. Worked overtime. Drove us everywhere. But he rarely said “I love you.” Rarely talked about fear. Rarely showed vulnerability.
