I read something in the county paper eleven months ago about a young man named Dale Whitcombe, who lost his fiancée and his own daughter the same terrible day, and who spent every visiting hour at the hospital afterward, sitting with other families in the maternity ward waiting room, simply so no parent facing bad news had to sit there completely alone. I never met you, but I read that article more times than I can count over the following months, and something about it stayed with me in a way I still don’t fully understand.
I am not able to keep my daughters safe where I currently am. I won’t put the details of why in writing, in case this letter is ever found by the wrong person, but I need you to understand it isn’t because I don’t want them. It’s because I want them safe more than I want to keep them, and I don’t believe I can currently provide both at once.
I chose this beach because I read, in a second article six months later, that you’d moved here after everything happened, that you sometimes walked this stretch of coastline in the evenings. I am trusting a man I’ve never met with the single most important thing in my life, because everything I’ve ever read about you tells me you know exactly what it means to be given a second chance at fatherhood, and exactly how much you’d protect it.
