Skip to content 
He didn’t need to hide letters forever.
Only long enough.
By the time I moved out, the damage was done.
My friends believed I’d rejected them.
I believed they’d forgotten me.
After enough unanswered letters, hurt did what my father had counted on. We stopped trying.
I was furious.
But anger had nowhere to go.
My father had been dead for 26 years.
Tommy was dead, and so was Ray.
There are some things an apology cannot restore because everyone who deserves to hear it is already gone.
But Nick wasn’t.
And I wasn’t going to lose whatever time we had left.
***
Three weeks later, I stepped off a plane in Portugal.
Luis met me at the airport.
Nick lived with his wife in a small house overlooking the sea.
During the drive, I barely spoke.
“What if he doesn’t recognize me?” I finally asked.
Luis laughed.
“He will.”
Nick was sitting beside a window when I walked into the room.
He was thin.
Much thinner than the boy in my memory.
His hair was white, his hands spotted with age, and an oxygen tube ran beneath his nose.
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then his eyes moved over my face.
A small smile appeared. “You took your time.”
I laughed.
It came out as a sob.
Nick’s smile trembled.
Then he held out his hand.
I crossed the room and took it, but that wasn’t enough.
I bent down and hugged him.
Nick’s arms came around me.
And suddenly 55 years disappeared.
Not completely. Nothing could ever give them back.
But for a moment I could smell lake water and summer grass, and I could hear Tommy arguing with Ray while four boys promised one another something none of us understood would become important.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
Nick pulled back.
“For what?”
“For not finding you.”
He shook his head.
“We didn’t find you either.”
“My father took the letters.”
Nick went still as I told him everything.
About the drawer.
The 23 envelopes.
The note.
When I finished, Nick stared through the window for a long time.
“So you didn’t leave us.”
“No.”
He squeezed my hand.
“We didn’t leave you either.”
I had brought the old letters with me to Portugal.
I pulled out one of my own unsent letters and handed it to Nick.
He read the line I’d written at 18.
“Don’t forget about me over there.”
Nick closed his eyes.
“Harold,” he said quietly, “we never did.”
Those words hurt more than anything I’d read in the boxes.
Because they gave me exactly what I’d wanted at 18.
Only 55 years late.
We talked for hours. About Tommy, about Ray.
About marriages and children and jobs and mistakes.
Nick told me Tommy had kept that useless red lure through six house moves.
Ray had carried his compass to Germany, then kept it in his desk for the rest of his life.
Nick still had the knife.
“I wanted you to have it,” he said.