Elisabeth shook her head gently.
“I don't think he saw it as a question of trust. I think he was frightened that telling you would reopen wounds he believed were beginning to heal.”
“But he knew I was growing up.”
“Yes.”
“He knew I had become a mother, found work, and built a life.”
“Yes.”
“Then why did he still believe he had to protect me from knowing something about my own daughter?”
Elisabeth took a slow breath.
“Sometimes parents continue seeing their children at the age when they were most vulnerable. Your father knew you had become an adult. But part of him may always have seen the frightened thirteen-year-old girl he wanted to save.”
Emma looked down at the letter.
She remembered Michael's voice.
You will always be my little girl.
For years, those words had comforted her.
Now they seemed to carry another meaning.
Perhaps her father had loved her so fiercely that he struggled to recognize when she no longer needed him to make decisions for her.
