Found out the letter I burned had been read, and now I don't know how to feel

My sister found a draft of an apology letter I wrote to our dad 6 years ago, hidden in an old notebook she borrowed. She says he never saw it, but yesterday she mentioned a line from it that only he could have told her. Is keeping an apology unsent a kindness or a cowardice, and does it change anything if someone else read it first?

2 comments

2 Comments

wilson.joseph1mo ago

Take a breath here. You're assuming your sister got that line from your dad, but people find stuff in notebooks all the time and just remember it wrong. Maybe she read the whole thing years ago and forgot until now, or she pieced it together from something you said recently. Either way, you're treating her as the messenger of this big secret, but the simpler answer is she's just clumsy with other people's stuff. And on the cowardice question, not sending an apology is usually just fear of the fallout, not kindness. But that's between you and him, not you and her.

the_claire1mo ago

Realized I was doing the same thing as your sister with someone else's stuff the other day. Picked up my roommate's journal thinking it was mine, read a full page before I caught it. Never even told him. So yeah, your point about people just finding notebooks and misremembering is probably closer to the truth than any big conspiracy about your dad. And the fear thing, that part hit me too. Most people don't send apologies because they're scared of how it'll land, not because they're being noble. That's a much easier explanation than the one I was spinning.