She kept the letter her whole life, but not for herself: for her daughter.
“This is the only letter I ever received from your father,” was written in her mother’s familiar cursive on the back of the envelope with a sharp black pen, but the letter was dated and signed in blue ink in an unfamiliar and unsteady hand. Blotched. Splattered. Had he written the letter with a fountain pen, or while on the deck of a ship in the rain, or—?
After so many years, permanently deleted, and after so many permanent deaths had erased the only two people on Earth who might have been able to remember, or even to speculate—?
Well, what did it matter? Even if he’d been weeping when he’d written the letter, her father wasn’t weeping by then.
The entirety of it read:
“This is the only letter you’ll ever receive from me, you worthless _____.”
The last word was so completely scratched out with the tip of a sharp black pen that the tip of it had torn through the paper on which the word had been written.
And this would’ve been another mystery, except that the slit left behind by the violence that had been done to the word he’d written was more the word itself than the word itself could have been.