A broken glass | Source: Pexels
"You didn't open it, did you?" she whispered, her eyes wide with something that looked like pure panic. "Gerry, tell me you didn't open that trunk!"
I hadn't opened it yet, but the fear in her voice wasn't normal. This wasn't about old furniture or dusty clothes. This was about something much bigger, much more important than that.
That night, I couldn't sleep a wink. I kept tossing and turning, thinking about the look on Martha's face, the way her voice had cracked when she asked about that trunk. Curiosity was clawing at me from the inside, demanding answers I wasn't sure I was ready to hear.
A house's window at night | Source: Pexels
A house's window at night | Source: Pexels
Around midnight, I gave up on sleep entirely. I went down to the garage, found my old bolt cutters, and climbed those stairs one more time.
The lock on that trunk snapped more easily than I expected. My hands were trembling as I lifted the heavy wooden lid, and what I found inside made my knees go weak.
The trunk was full of letters. Hundreds and hundreds of them, all tied up in faded ribbons and organized by date. The oldest ones were from 1966, the very year Martha and I got married. The newest were from the late 1970s. But these weren't letters from me or anyone else I recognized.
They were all addressed to Martha, and they were all signed by someone named Daniel.
An envelope | Source: Pexels
An envelope | Source: Pexels
I picked up one of the oldest letters with shaking hands and read it by flashlight. It started with, "My dearest Martha," and talked about missing her something terrible, about counting the days until he could come home to her.
But it was the ending that made my heart skip a beat. Every single letter ended the same way: "I'll come for you and our son when the time is right. All my love, Daniel."
Our son? What son?
I felt like someone had sucker-punched me right in the chest. I sat down hard on an old crate and started reading more letters.
A handwritten letter | Source: Pexels
A handwritten letter | Source: Pexels
The letters painted a picture I never could have imagined. This Daniel fellow had been writing to Martha about a child, their child, for over a decade. He wrote about watching from a distance, about seeing "little James" grow up, about how proud he was of the boy.
James. My firstborn son, James.
I had to read that name three times before it sank in. The boy I'd taught to throw a baseball, the kid who'd followed me around the garage while I worked on cars, the young man I'd walked down the aisle at his wedding. The letters were talking about my James.
A young man smiling | Source: Pexels
A young man smiling | Source: Pexels
The next day, I drove to the care facility with those letters burning a hole in my jacket pocket. Martha took one look at my face and knew exactly what had happened.
"You found them," she whispered, her eyes filling with tears.
"Martha, who the hell is Daniel?" I demanded. "What son is he talking about?"
She broke down sobbing right there in her hospital bed. Between the tears and the gasping breaths, the whole truth finally spilled out.
Before she met me, she'd been engaged to a young man named Daniel. He got drafted to Vietnam in early 1966. Right after he shipped out, Martha found out she was pregnant with his baby.
A woman holding a positive pregnancy test | Source: Pexels
A woman holding a positive pregnancy test | Source: Pexels
"He begged me to wait for him," she cried. "He wrote me letters every week, promising he'd come home to us, that we'd raise our child together. But then his plane went down over Cambodia. Missing in action. Everyone said he was dead, Gerry. Everyone."
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