My Stepfamily Moved In… Weeks Later, My Cat Was Dead

I opened the letter in my bedroom.

The same room where I had found May.

Dad sat beside me. Caleb and Mark waited downstairs, giving us space.

The paper smelled like dust and old cardboard.

My mother's handwriting tilted slightly to the right, exactly as I remembered from school lunch notes.

Emma,

If you ever read this, I hope it is many years from now and I am sitting somewhere nearby pretending not to watch you cry.

I stopped.

Dad covered his mouth.

I kept reading.

She wrote about being afraid of Vanessa, but most of the letter was not about fear.

It was about me.

She said I was stubborn in the best way. She said I loved injured things because I could never stand to see something small believe it had been forgotten.

Then she wrote:

If you bring another stray animal into this house, your father will complain for ten minutes and build it a bed by dinner.

Dad laughed and cried at the same time.

The letter had been written only three weeks before her death.

Near the end, she wrote:

Do not let anyone teach you that love means keeping the peace at any cost. Real love protects. Real love tells the truth. Real love opens the door when someone is scared outside in the rain.

I could not breathe for a moment.

Nine years earlier, only months after my mother's death, I had found May shivering under the eaves of a closed store during a storm.

I had held out my hand.

She had trusted me.

Maybe that was why losing her had torn through me so completely.

She had been the first living thing I chose after grief convinced me choosing anything meant I could lose it.

I folded the letter against my chest.

Dad whispered, "She would've loved May."

"I think she somehow did."

The next morning, we buried May beneath the maple tree at the edge of our yard.

I placed her red toy mouse beside her.

Then Caleb walked over holding something small.