Page 376 of Face Off

It is also mine.

I leave it.

I can’t imagine any version of you more beautiful than one carrying our child.

I would watch your body become softer and fuller because it was building a life we made together. I would know what every pound cost you. Watching you battle your illness to keep our baby healthy and nurtured inside you would never make me see weakness.

I would see the bravest woman I have ever known.

Whatever came afterward, I would have your fucking back.

That doesn’t mean I would become responsible for your recovery. You are right to refuse that. It means you would never enter the fight alone, and I wouldn’t confuse supporting you with taking away your right to lead it.

You promised honesty instead of ease.

I would choose an honest, complicated life with you before I accepted an easy one with anyone else.

Even with the olives.

I need time before I can tell you everything your words about my mother did to me.

Nobody has ever spoken about my mom as though she remained my mother after she died. People tell me she would be proud because that is what they believe a grieving child needs to hear. You told me what she witnessed. You gave her back every year she was stolen from me and made her present for every version of the boy I had to become without her.

I don’t know whether I deserve the certainty you gave me.

I know I need it.

I have spent my life believing survival meant I had successfully stopped needing anyone to see what things cost me. Your letter reminded me that strength doesn’t erase the child who wanted his mother while strangers decided where he would sleep.

You finally saw him.

You saw me.

I am angry that it took this long, but I won’t deny the awe of being understood by the person I have always wanted to understand me most.

As for your father, Lance is a racist?

I am shocked.

I pause long enough to smile, then keep writing.

Fuck Lance. I already knew.

Thank you for examining your privilege and owning what it allowed you to ignore because he never will. You being controlled doesn’t erase the ways his money, name, and whiteness protected you. Your privilege doesn’t erase the abuse you survived beneath his control.

Both truths belong to you.

I am sorry he is your father.

You, Crystal, and Charlie deserved better than the man who decided love meant shaping all of you into reflections of himself.

Knowing his failures doesn’t make you responsible for them. Refusing to repeat them is where your responsibility begins.

You are doing that.

I fold Charm’s letter along its softened creases before continuing.

The regular season is underway.