To my daughters:

It pains me that you should return to your childhood home on so unhappy an occasion. I hope you can forgive me for delaying news of my illness and deterioration; I have followed along with great pride as you excelled in America, and I did not wish to disrupt your progress. Life is to be spent creating something greater than oneself—it is not to be spent bemoaning the inevitable passing of an old man whose best days are long behind him. I differ from many of those my age in this belief, but I believe your mother would have agreed.

It is she who also provides me with the reason for this letter today—it is she who requires that I ask a favor of you in this delicate moment.

I carry with me a few sources of great shame in life. One is that I lacked the courage, or the wisdom, to share the truth about her with you. Your mother was not who she said she was. She bore secrets that no child should hear about a parent who has left this world—not, at the very least, until they become adults. Or so I believe. In fact, some of these secrets are still not mine to share—and I imagine there are others still unknown to me.

My voice wavers and breaks. The words are unlike Dad in their sheer quantity and in their melodrama. “Should I … keep reading?” I ask. A futile question, meant only to provide a couple of moments to help quiet the panic building in my skull. Because it would be impossible for me to leave this unread, if it truly holds secrets about Mama, good or bad.

Tai nods, riveted, tears already staining her pink cheeks. I turn my eyes back to the page.

Your mother was a mystery to me in many ways. In her final months with us, I believe she discovered something dark in Viloxin, perhaps at my own company, that she would not reveal to me. She would not speak to me in those final months, and she refused to explain why. And so, my daughters, that leads me to another great source of shame: I returned to my work, out of frustration and foolishness, for this was my custom at the time, and she in turn devoted herself to a new and final project at her institute. A project by the name of White Fox.

A tremor zips from my fingers to my shoulders. We’d always been told growing up that her final project did not actually exist—that those long nights she spent working were imagined. I never believed it in full. We simply believed it as much as we needed to, so that in our memories, our hours together remained her most precious ones.

“So White Fox was real,” I whisper.