The letter continued.
I should have told you. I should have given you Douglas’s letter and allowed you both to make your own decisions. Instead, I told him you had moved on. Later, when your father learned that Douglas had married, he asked me to write to you. He said you needed to stop waiting for a man who had chosen someone else.
I wrote the letter you received.
I wanted to protect you from disappointment, but I was protecting myself from admitting that I had interfered.
There was a second page.
I did not know about the ring until years later.
Douglas’s mother came to see me in 1990. She brought the letters he had written to you. She said she had kept them because she believed the two of you would eventually find your way back to each other, and she did not want the letters used to destroy his marriage.
