Page 77 of What Makes an Alien a Dad?

You are the only woman I have ever loved, and the only one I’ll ever love for the rest of my days.

If you choose to leave, I can’t stop you. But I wish, pray, and hope that you will stay. Because I no longer can imagine my life without you.

Our correspondence can never stop. The conversation I started months ago will forever continue whether you’re near me or not. I speak with you daily. In my mind, I keep telling you about my day. I share my thoughts and feelings with you and only you.

This is my reality now. You’ve made your way so deep into my life, my thoughts, and my very being that there is no way to separate me from you anymore.

You are a part of me, and I’d do anything to keep us whole.

Please give me a chance to right the wrong. Stay. Give me some time to prove to you that you already know me, all of me. You know me better than anyone in the Universe. I hid nothing from you. You just have to put the right name on the person behind the letters.

I hope you read this because I can never put accurately everything I feel into words when I speak to you.

I hope you’ll reply.

I’ll be waiting.

I live for your letters. Even if this is the last one I’ll ever get to write to you.

With all my love. Kear.”

A tear fell on the screen. I quickly brushed off another one from my check. For someone who claimed he was bad with words, he seemed to find some pretty good ones every time.

The best word this time was his name at the end. It was like a ray of honesty in the fog of deception that had been surrounding me. I wondered how he felt signing with his own name for once.

I had no idea how to feel about all of this now.

How much of what he wrote was true? Could I even trust him? After all, he’d been lying to me for months.

I opened the folder with the vast collection of all his letters, all that came from Walter’s account.

It was easy to find the one when Kear hijacked our correspondence and took over. The first letter he wrote was much shorter and sounded far more reserved. It was signed “Walter.” The name looked like a mockery to me, blinking at me from the screen like a cruel joke.

I remembered how I felt the day I received it. I was relieved that Walter had reconsidered breaking up with me, but I also felt confused. Walter didn’t sound like him in this one. He didn’t sound like Walter in any that came after this one, either.

In them, he sounded better. More considerate, selfless, carrying. He sounded like the friend that Walter might’ve been to me at some point at the beginning of our relationship but hadn’t been for some time at the end.

No wonder I’d accepted the deception so easily. I wanted to believe Walter was back. That I had a friend once again. And in a way, I did have a friend. Walter never wrote these letters, but they gave me the support I so badly needed.

I kept opening the letters, scrolling through them one by one and remembering all the warm feelings they had caused when I’d first read them.

After the first two, none of the other ones were signed with Walter’s name. There was no name at all. Instead of a signature, there were just short phrases of encouragement, support, and affection that grew increasingly warmer and brighter as time went by.

There were no silly nicknames that Walter liked to use, none of his usual mannerisms. Kear had made no effort to sound like my ex. As I re-read his letters, the words sounded in his voice in my head.

They were his all along.

Walter never spoke like this. But Kear did.

How could I not see it earlier?

In a way, I believed I did see it. I sensed some dissonance. But I attributed it to Walter’s changing and becoming more mature. It was easy enough to believe the changes in him since I hadn’t seen him for over a year.

I stopped scrolling and dropped my face into my hands.

What was I to do now?

“I love you,” Kear’s words echoed in my head.

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