“Mom, did you make this?”
I shook my head.
Inside was a photograph of Hannah—one I had taken myself just three days earlier.
But the message inside the card made my blood run cold.
“Happy birthday, little sister. I promised I’d be here.”
My heart seemed to stop.
Hannah had no siblings except Luke.
There was no one else who could have written those words.
“Is this somebody’s idea of a joke?” Hannah asked, her voice breaking. “Luke was my only brother. You all know how much I miss him.”
Before I could even figure out what to say, the doorbell rang.
I told Hannah’s friends to stay with her, assuming another birthday guest had arrived.
Then I opened the front door.
And the moment I saw the person standing on my porch, my hand flew to the doorframe to keep myself from collapsing.
“Oh my God…”
I could barely breathe.
“How… how is this possible?”
I stared at him through tears.
“After all these years… you’re here?”
“You kept that card for all these years?”
“In a drawer. In every apartment I moved to.” Victor wiped his eyes. “I couldn’t throw it away, and I couldn’t bring myself to face you. So I kept watch from a distance. I knew where Hannah went to school. I knew when she got that job at the coffee shop.”
I stared at him.
“You spied on us.”
“I checked on you,” he said softly. “It’s not the same thing, and it’s not enough. I know.”
I looked down at the card in my hand, still struggling to understand how something Luke had written thirteen years ago had somehow found its way into Hannah’s hands on her eighteenth birthday.
Then Victor explained the photograph.
“Three days ago, I sat at a table outside that coffee shop and took her picture at the same time you took it. Hannah was laughing with a customer. She looked so much like Luke. It stopped my heart.”
He swallowed hard.
“I put the photo in the card the way he’d meant to. Then I dropped it in your mailbox a day ago, before I could change my mind.”
I stared at him in disbelief.
“And now you show up? Today? On her birthday?”
Victor held up the small wrapped box he had brought with him.
“Look, Daphne, I am here because Luke asked me to. Not just to deliver a card. To actually be here.”
His voice cracked.
“I’ve spent years being a coward. I don’t want to spend another day doing that.”
I looked at the man standing in front of me.
