Page 100 of Tipping Point

When he drives out on the tarmac and stops the car next to a small private plane, he grabs my arm before I can get out.

“I quit.” His voice is full of pain and regret.

I don’t answer him. I get out of the car and when I board the plane, all my luggage from the hotel is there.

A hostess brings me a whiskey at my request and I sit back in the seat, pain lancing through my collarbone. My arm in the sling feels useless and limp, and I clutch it to my chest, trying not to jostle my shoulder.

At my request she hands me my travel bag, and I ruffle around inside for my cellphone. It’s dead.

I toss it aside.

And then my eyes catch sight of the letter. The one I’ve been lugging around for months.

I break the seal before I can stop myself.

Three sheafs of paper, handwritten in a curly, feminine script. The pages tremble in my hands.

I’m so empty inside that I relish it, this opportunity to fill up on hate and rage and despair. The accusations are already forming in my mind.

It’s from Grace’s daughter, and her name is Hope.

She’s pouring out years’ worth of hate and despair, and I revel in it.

Sentences jump out at me.

I hated you more than I can ever say…wish she had died…wish you had died instead…

And then the tone changes.

Finished college…I am now a trauma therapist…changed my life.

And then.

Thank you. The financial support has given us opportunities we might not have had otherwise. And while it can’t change the past, it is hard to deny that it has changed our future.

I forgive you now, because I must. My resentment will chain me to a past I cannot change and withhold me from a future that I can.

I hope you can forgive yourself.

Tears blur out the rest of the letter. I haven’t cried since my mother left.

This girl, she had written me to forgive me.

She has absolved me of fifteen years’ worth of robbed memories, and of a lifetime’s worth of memories ahead.

It shatters me.

My aching ribs heave under the strain of her words, the regret a bitter film on my tongue.

I have sacrificed every joy, ensured that I punished myself every day, to mete out my own sense of justice, and, finding the sentence too heavy a burden, had opted to cheat myself instead, to take my life and free me from my self-imposed prison.

It never occurred to me I could be forgiven, in earnest.

It’s not absolution, but it is forgiveness.

It is a sentence served, and, reeling, I realised I was free to go.

* * *

---