By then my coffee had gone stone cold and I’d readthe last one twice. The last letter from David was different. His handwriting got shaky toward the end of it, you could tell. He wrote, “You’re the only person who’s told me I deserve to live.” Then he said before his parole hearing he had to tell Dale the truth.

He said the accident wasn’t what the report says. He said the reason he was doing 87 on that road was because his own little boy, Mason, was in the back seat. Four years old. Seizing. Going blue. David was drunk, yes, but he was racing him to the county hospital because he didn’t think the ambulance would beat him there.

Mason died that night too. Two days before Cole, actually. David had buried his own son the same week he took my son from me. The report never said any of it because David never told a soul. He let them write him up as just a drunk who didn’t care. He said in that letter, “I deserved to be the only monster. Mason didn’t deserve to be a reason.”

I sat there with my hand over my mouth. Dale’s truck was in the driveway. He was asleep down the hall, no idea I’d ever found that key. And I thought about all those years I’d hated one flat, simple thing, and how my husband had been carrying the whole crooked shape of it alone because he knew it would break me clean in half.

I still haven’t told Dale I read them. I put the rubber band back just how it was and I locked the little brass door and I drove home with my hands shaking on the wheel. He thinks I still don’t know. Some nights I almost say something. Then I look at him across the table eating cereal out of the box the way Cole used to, and I can’t.

I keep thinking about that other father, in that cell, and the one thing I can’t get out of my head is that there were two little boys lost on that road that week, and for seven years I only ever cried for one of them.