My darling daughters:

Your father did keep this text safely for you. Last year, with your birthdays coming up, he finally read it and then he gave it to me. He wanted my advice, or my permission perhaps. Your mother intended you to read this, she wanted you to know our pasts. And who are we to interfere in her decisions about her relationship with you just because we can? I love you both and have always enjoyed being your stepmother. I know things have not always been easy between us; you girls were so sad and confused when I first arrived in the house. I wanted to spend every day hugging away all the pain in your little faces but I wasn’t your mother; I couldn’t make it up to you. And later? I guess adolescence is never easy for anyone.

My solution, the only solution I could think of, has been to love you as much as I possibly could through the years, for your father’s sake, but also because I felt I owed that to your mother. She may have had her reasons to resent me, but I never felt any hostility toward her. In truth, there was a period where I just wanted to be her, which may sound silly since I think I only met her once, at a party or something, but I used to long to be her. I guess what I really mean is that I longed to be your father’s wife. It was odd reading what she had written; I certainly knew what it felt like to be Shay and then the bits about marriage really struck home. Long marriages are often more complicated than they look from the outside.

Your mother has taught me things about your father that I didn’t even know. Somehow it’s hard to picture the great Dickens scholar as a little boy playing marbles in the streets of Tehran, isn’t it? Even when we went back there last year, he never mentioned the marbles.

I know when you ask him about his childhood and Iran, he always says it was a different life; that he is Canadian now, but sometimes when he talks about a rug or says a few words in Farsi, you can see he is still half Persian.

But, most of all, you have to realize how proud he is of you both. It was a big reason why he wanted to go back to Iran. He just wanted to be able to tell his cousins and his aunts: “This is Goli, some day soon she will be president of the bank; this is Anahita, she fills in for the main newscaster on weekends but soon enough they will see that he has to go so that she can take over the job.” He would never say such things in Canada. I know it made you both squirm but he loves you to pieces, both of you, even if he doesn’t always say it.

Last year, I asked him if he wanted to go back to Iran again this summer and do you know what he said? He said, “Goli and Anahita and Hope are my country.” He stressed each of our three names so emphatically and so equally. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever said to me. It so confirmed for me that I was part of you.

So, now you can read your mother’s last story. As she herself told you, it is yours to do with as you wish. You always call me Mum and that means a lot to me but I know if people ask you directly, you say “Hope is our stepmother. Our real mother died when we were eight.” You explain your mother grew up in Halifax and moved to Toronto as a student; that she was a popular novelist who had published several best-sellers before she died of breast cancer at thirty-eight. And you say that your father is an Iranian immigrant and an English literature professor at the university who specializes in the works of Charles Dickens. But Sharon has given you another truth, and you should cherish it: if people ask where you came from, tell them your father was a prince of Persia and your mother a storyteller from Samarkand. And no one could ever really say which one seduced the other.

H.