I promised my dying wife I’d keep raising her three children as my own — two years later my twelve-year-old put her pen down and said, « Before you open those boxes, you need to know the truth about Mum. »

She has never met him. She has never spoken to him on a telephone. She would not give him a phone number, which was her own decision, at eleven, and which the social worker later described to me as « frankly, sensible. »

And that is actually why she told me.

Not because of the attic. The attic just made the timing.

She told me because she had been doing something in secret for eighteen months and had decided she did not want to do it in secret anymore.

And the only route out of the secret ran directly through telling the man who adopted her that her mother had lied.

She said — and this is the sentence, and I wrote it down that night —

« I didn’t want to keep doing it without you knowing. But the only way to stop is to tell you a bad thing about Mum, and she’s dead, and she can’t say anything back. »

Twelve years old.

She had worked out the entire ethical shape of it on her own and had been stuck inside it for a year and a half.

What I did.

I did not read the letters that night. She offered and I said no.

I asked her three questions and then I made the dinner and we ate it and I put a film on, and I did not sleep.

The three questions were: Are you all right. Does he know where you live. And: What do you want.

She said yes. She said no, he only has a PO box she opened at the newsagent with eleven dollars of her own money — and I would like somebody to sit with that fact for a moment, because I have not stopped.

And the third answer was: « I want to keep writing to him and I want it to be allowed. »

Not to live with him. Not to meet him. She had thought about it for eighteen months and what she wanted was permission.

The following six weeks.

Zofia. Katia’s sister. I rang her on the eleventh.

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