‘We’re lucky to have each other.’
*
Diana – 1980s
A month after her father’s death, Diana was ready to open the safe.
She had spent every day in the garden since her father had died and found it as healing and as meditative as Pete had said it would be. She turned things over in her mind as she turned the soil and ran over the past with every weed she pulled.
She was feeling strong and suntanned but her heart still ached.
Those years after they had taken her child away were some of the most painful Diana had ever known. Now she understood that she had needed help. She’d had a breakdown. Her milk coming in days after she was home from the hospital, the pain of the surgery, the few small things her mother had given her of Diana’s as a baby were all reminders of the lack of life she had now.
She had been her father’s prisoner and her mother was complicit.
Diana sat on her father’s chair now and looked at the safe under the desk. His study was the embodiment of who he had been as a man. Wooden, stiff, and without any adornment beyond the leather-bound books. Not even a photo of his wife and daughter.
She thought back to his words. ‘Her birthday’, he had said.
She turned the dial six times to spell out her mother’s birthday, but the safe didn’t click to open.
Diana tried again with the same result. She frowned and then tried her own birthday as the combination, but nothing happened.
She sat back in the seat and tried to think. Who was ‘her’?
His mother?God help me,Diana thought,I have no idea when his mother was born.She was dead a long time before Diana entered the world.
Diana looked at the safe again and then she put in the numbers of the day when her world was torn from inside her.
The safe clicked.
Diana gasped and she opened the steel door.
Inside lay a pile of papers and letters tied with a blue ribbon. She carefully lifted them onto the desk and pulled the bow on the satin ribbon so it fell away.
On top of the pile was a piece of paper folded into thirds, with her name on the top in her father’s writing.
Diana paused. She wasn’t sure she wanted to read the letter. She didn’t need his disappointment from the grave as well.
Slowly she opened it and smoothed it out on the desk.
Dear Diana,
I don’t think there are words for the pain and heartbreak I have caused you over these past twenty years.
I am ashamed and deeply sorry for the decision I made that I know was the wrong one.
I wanted you to know that just weeks after your daughter, my granddaughter, went to the adoptive parents’ home, I went to retrieve her. I told them it was a mistake and you needed your baby back.
They refused to return her, and said it was a legal adoption. I told them I would get a solicitor on the case and they would be going to court and I would win because I knew many judges.
It was the wrong thing to say because when I went back to see them again, they were gone. I had private detectives try and find them over the years. I offered rewards to anyone who had seen them, but they simply vanished, with your child.
I know this doesn’t make amends for the profound grief I have caused you but I wanted you to know I tried to fix it but, perhaps, I made it worse.
All I can do now is leave you the adoption papers, the correspondence with the family and the only photo I have of them with your child at six months old.
She was a dear little thing, with the bluest eyes and copper hair and a pretty rosebud mouth like yours.
