SHE GAVE HIS DAUGHTER’S DOG AWAY — THEN BOUGHT HER KIDS A NEW PUPPY

I waited until Saturday to open the envelope.

There was no rule that said I had to wait. I wanted Aunt Ruth there, and I wanted Leo and Maya at home. I wanted to choose a day that felt like mine.

We made breakfast together. Dad let Maya stir the pancake batter, which meant flour ended up on the counter and in her hair. Leo cut strawberries and gave me the biggest ones when he thought nobody was looking.

After breakfast, I brought the envelope into the living room.

“Do you want us to leave?” Dad asked.

“Stay.”

I sat on the couch between Aunt Ruth and Maya. Leo took the rug, and Dad sat across from me. I opened the envelope slowly, careful with the seal.

Mom’s letter was shorter than the birthday ones.

She wrote that she hoped I would have many people to love after she was gone. She hoped I would let them love me back. She knew grief could make a person guard every memory, afraid that a new happy day might push an old one away.

She told me there would always be room for both.

I read the last lines aloud.

“I hope you laugh in your home, Nia. I hope you ask for what you need. And when someone says you belong with them, I hope their actions make it easy to believe.”

My voice caught on the final word.

Dad bowed his head. Aunt Ruth squeezed my hand.

Maya climbed into my lap. “Are you happy?” she whispered.

I thought about that.

Some mornings, I still missed Mom so much it hurt. I was still learning how to trust Dad’s promises. Leo and Maya still had difficult days after seeing Vanessa. None of us could make those feelings disappear.

But I knew where my letters were. I knew I could tell Dad when I was angry. I had people in the room who listened when I spoke.

“Yes,” I told Maya. “Right now, I am.”

We spent the afternoon in the garden Mom used to love. Dad had found her old planting notes, and Aunt Ruth helped us choose flowers for the empty patch beside the fence.

I dug a hole for a small blue salvia plant. Maya tipped water from a can that was nearly too heavy for her. Leo steadied it with one hand.

Dad knelt beside us, his good suit replaced by an old T-shirt.

“I’m getting better at being here,” he said quietly.

“You are.”

“I know I can’t give you back the time I missed.”

I pressed soil around the plant. “I know.”

He waited.

“I need you to keep asking me how I am,” I said. “Even when I say I’m fine the first time.”

“I can do that.”

“And I want to talk about Mom at dinner sometimes.”

“I want that too.”

I looked up at him. “Then tell me a story I haven’t heard.”

He smiled sadly. “The day we met, she argued with me over the last umbrella in a shop. It was raining so hard neither of us wanted to leave without it.”

“Who got it?”

“She did. Then she held it over both of us to the bus stop.”

Aunt Ruth laughed. “She left out the part where she made you carry all her shopping bags.”

“She certainly did,” Dad said.

I asked him to tell the story again that evening so Leo and Maya could hear it. At dinner, Maya insisted we should keep an umbrella by the front door in Mom’s honor.

We did.

A few weeks later, I turned thirteen. Dad gave me a new pair of sneakers. He had checked the size twice and kept the receipt in case I wanted another color.

I tried them on and ran down the hall. They fit.

Leo gave me a bookmark he had made from one of his drawings. Maya gave me a lopsided bracelet of blue beads, with one yellow bead in the middle like the one she had found in Vanessa’s car.

Aunt Ruth brought a cake. Dad lit the candles.

Before I blew them out, I looked around the table. Mom’s photograph was in the hallway where everyone could see it. My blue box waited on the living room shelf. I would read her thirteenth birthday letter later, when I was ready.

Dad was watching me with tears in his eyes. Leo had frosting on his thumb. Maya was already leaning toward the cake.

I didn’t have to wonder whether I was allowed to want this day.