The Wedding Dress by Lucy Kevin

the mistake he’d made with me. Your mother may have wanted to do the same, because I suspect she knew, toward the end. I know that I wanted to protect my daughter when I kept her father’s identity from her.
     
    As she read it, Anne knew that was true. Her mother had tried to protect her. Wouldn’t her father have tried to do the same and more?
     
    I’m not asking for your forgiveness. I’m asking you to understand. As parents, as people, we try to do our best. We try to be perfect for the people we love, because we know better than anyone just how much they deserve that perfection. Yet we aren’t perfect. We make mistakes, and then we make more mistakes trying to protect the people we love from them. None of that changes how much we love the people we care about.
     
    I won’t claim to have known Edward Farleigh the way your mother knew him, but I knew him enough to know that he did his best for the people he loved. And he loved you and your mother very, very much.
     
    Deirdre Turner
     
    Anne folded the letter up carefully.
    Her father had done so much that was wrong. He’d betrayed her mother. He’d betrayed her. He’d had a whole other facet to his life that Anne had known nothing about.
    Yet even as Anne let herself be angry, even as she finally faced the pain of accepting the truth about what her father had done, she also found another emotion pushing in alongside it.
    Understanding.
    Yes, she hated that her father had cheated on her mother. Of course, she hated that he’d had a daughter he’d never told them about. But for the first time in her life, Anne could see her mother and father for who they really were.
    Not wrapped up in a fantasy she’d created about true love. Not tied to her image of them holding on to each other in the car crash, or how perfect they’d looked on their wedding day.
    Just the two of them as wonderful people she loved, but who were, like anyone else, full of flaws and problems and mistakes.
    It was so hard for her to see them like that. To think that her mother had known about her father’s affair…and that the two of them had simply tried to do their best to make things work going forward.
    But was that what love truly was, Anne wondered, rather than the easy perfection she’d always dreamed about? And was it only when things went wrong or were difficult that two people had to love one another to keep going?
    Only, she already knew the answer.
    Because he was standing right in front of her.
    She reached for Gareth and wrapped her arms around him. “Thank you for doing this for me.”
    “I’d do anything for you.”
    Ms. Williams poked her head around the meeting room door. “It’s time to come back inside.”
    Anne went back in with Gareth beside her. Jasmine and Richard Wells were sitting together on the other side of the table with matching stern expressions. Yet when Anne looked at the other woman now, all she could see was the pain Jasmine must have felt growing up, thinking that her own father didn’t care enough about her to want anything to do with her.
    On impulse, Anne pushed the letter across the table.
    “What’s this?” Jasmine demanded, looking at Anne with suspicion.
    “Something I think you should read.”
    Richard Wells quickly interjected, “My client isn’t going to read anything until I have looked it over.”
    But Anne wasn’t the least bit intimidated by the lawyer. “If Jasmine wants you to read it, you can, but she should read it first. Her mother wrote it.”
    “My mother?”
    Jasmine opened up the paper and started to read. Anne watched the swirl of conflicting emotions move across her pretty face as she read it.
    Anne knew exactly how she felt. When she was done, Jasmine looked up.
    “I need some time to think.” She spoke to Ms. Williams. “I need to talk to my mother. Could we postpone this?”
    “Jasmine,” Richard said, “we have her right where we want her. What are you doing?”
    “Thinking. And I’d like to