My Dearest Tetsuya,

I hope this letter finds you in good health. It is not my intention to distress you with this, but there are certain things I need to tell you. I knew, though, that I should not contact you by phone or by email, so I chose this method.

Please keep and treasure the pot and the blanket. Your mother loved them both. The pot was one of our first purchases as a newly married couple that was not for practical purposes. She loved the color and the lines, so she wanted to have it in our new home. The blanket, you may recall, was sewn by your grandmother. Your mother always felt a touch of home when she kept it nearby, and more than once she mended the blanket where a hole had been worn. Please keep it with the same care. I hope you feel her caress when you touch it, just as I always did.

I'm sorry I don't have any other mementos to give you. Your friend, Aomine-kun, was very upset when he could not find any pictures of your mother that day he and your other friends came to collect your belongings. I was out of my mind at the time, and I treated Aomine-kun very cruelly. I told him that I had burnt the pictures because they reminded me of a happier time and I could not bear that.

That is not the whole truth. While I did begin to find the sight of your mother's face unbearable, I did not burn anything. I put the photos in a long-term storage locker where I would not have to see them unless I deliberately sought them out. In that I was cruel, as I have been in many things, since I did not ask your opinion. I still remember how devastated you looked when you came home and there was only one picture left in the entire house that showed your mother's face. That photo was the one that had been in your room, so I didn't think of it. Later, I put it on the wall in the hallway as a small act of contrition to you, but it was not enough.

I did not have time to retrieve the photos before I left Tokyo. I regret that. I would have liked to take at least one or two with me to Russia. But, as with many other things that have happened, I have no one to blame but myself. So here is the key for the locker, and at the bottom of the letter I will leave the address of the storage facility and the password for the attendant. When you feel strong enough, go and get anything you like from there.

In the week since I lost you, I have thought a lot about what happened between us and who was to blame. Indeed, I have thought of little else. I am ashamed to admit that at first I blamed your new friends most unjustly. I blamed Kagami Taiga for taking you from our home, and I blamed Kagami Hiroshi for keeping you away. But as my mind cleared, I realized that what Kagami-san said in the restaurant was true. No one stole you from me. I lost you all on my own, and I will have to live with that for the rest of my life. No other regret will ever cut so keenly, so deep. But I deserve this pain, so I will bear it.

I hope you will believe me when I say that I truly do love you. You are my son, and you are precious to me. In my madness, I saw something other than my son when I looked at you, but I have only myself to blame for letting my vision become so clouded. I chose to stop taking the medication that helped me maintain my impulse control, my grip on reality. I thought I could control myself, at least for a little while, but that turned out not to be the case. You asked me not to do that, not to let the reins on myself go, but I ignored you. I thought you were saying that you could not trust me. In retrospect, you were completely correct. You cannot trust me. I cannot trust myself. Sometimes, love is not enough.

In my madness, I blamed you, but that was because of fear and weakness on my part. I did not want to believe I could do what I had done. I did not want to believe that I was that pathetic and twisted inside. Now that my eyes are clear again, I am thoroughly ashamed. I built walls around myself so that I could present myself to the world as a strong, confident, and good man. But those walls have all fallen now, and I am revealed for the ugly, wretched creature that I have become. That I always was.

You did nothing wrong, Tetsuya. If there is only one thing that you can take away from this letter, if there's only one thing that I can truly give you, let it be that. You were always a wonderful son, far better than I deserved. You fought for me far harder and far longer than I ever fought for myself. You did nothing wrong. Indeed, you did far more than what was required of you by any kind of familial duty, always giving more than you should have, more than you really were able to give. You gave and gave, and all I did was take. It seems to be my nature, and I don't know how to change that, so I have come to understand that it is best that we part ways, even though that wounds me to my core.

I can never atone for what I did to you, and I will not try to. If, someday, you are able to forgive me, that would make me glad. But you don't have to tell me. I will live in hope, but I will not contact you.

I know how caring you are, even for those who have hurt you deeply, so I want you to rest assured that I will be okay. I am going to have a fresh start in a new country far from Japan and everything that was inflicted on me and everything I inflicted on others. My company gave me a very comprehensive guide on resources that I can find at my new post, and someone had bookmarked the page for mental health assistance. I will take my medication, and I will seek out help instead of rejecting it for fear of appearing weak. I know now that I am a weak man, a very weak man, and I see no value in hiding that anymore.

I hope that you can have a fresh start, too. I hope that the Kagami name and the Kagami family will be good to you. I believe that will be true. I saw the way you looked at Kagami Hiroshi in that restaurant, and I saw the way he looked at you. The trust and affection between the two of you made me burn with envy. We had that once, or so I thought, but I chose to throw it away. But now, at the end, I have the clarity to be grateful that you were able to find it again, even though it wasn't with me.

Kagami Hiroshi told me that he would treasure you. I believe that is true. I certainly hope so. But if anything ever goes wrong, I think you have a lot of other people who will want to help you. Please don't make my mistake. Please don't hesitate to ask for help when you need it. It is not weakness to acknowledge your own needs and try to meet them. It is strength.

And you are very strong, Tetsuya. You always have been, and I believe that you will only continue to get stronger in the future.

Farewell, my son. Grow and learn and be strong. Take care.

I am now and always will be, most sincerely,
Your father

Dear Father,

Thank you for the letter. I hope that wherever you are today, you are well and happy. Please keep the promise you made in your letter. Please see a doctor regularly, keep your medicine up to date, and take it when you're supposed to. I'm not there to help you anymore, so you have to take care of yourself. I want you to do that.

I miss you. I miss the times we had together. I think I always will. I won't be able to walk in the park in springtime without thinking of you. I'll never look out at a crowd from the basketball court without wondering if you're somewhere in the stands, watching me.

I love you. But I can't stop thinking about what you said in your letter where you said that sometimes, love is not enough. It hurts me to say it, but you are right. The love you have for me and the love I have for you is not enough to enable us to live together, or even to see each other. Not anymore.

I'm not ready to forgive you, yet. You hurt me very badly. I don't think you understand quite how much you hurt me. I'm not sure I understand it, either. For a long time, I didn't let myself acknowledge that you hurt me at all. For years and years, I let myself believe that the way you treated me was normal. You taught me, by words and by actions, that I deserved your violence. You taught me that I was a freak and a monster who deserved to be struck and beaten. I'm still learning how false that was. I think it will take a long time to undo the damage of that.

But I do think a time will come when I'll be able to forgive you for everything. I don't know when, but I feel the possibility up ahead somewhere. It's like when you're standing in the world right before sunrise, and the sun hasn't come up yet, but you can tell that it's going to. The world is still and dark and silent, but light is on the horizon. I believe that morning light will come. When it does, perhaps I will contact you again. It might take a long time. Be patient.

In the meantime, I want you to know that I am happy. I'm as happy as I can possibly be. Hiroshi-san and Taiga-nii do indeed treasure me. I have never known such kindness and care, not since we lost Mother, though the way they love me is different than the way Mother loved me. But it's good. It's very good. I think there are not many people in the world who are treated as tenderly as I am treated.

I don't think you were ever aware of this, but part of the damage you did to me was that for a time, I was unable to play basketball. My skills seemed to have vanished. I felt that you had taken my basketball away from me somehow, and I felt a brokenness deep within myself. Taiga-nii thinks it was something like a mental block, and mental blocks can be worked past. Aomine-kun thought it would be simple to fix, and while he wasn't quite correct, his confidence in my ability to heal made it easier for me to believe it, too. Aomine-kun has always believed in my potential even when no one else did, even when I didn't.

Thank you for sending my basketball in that box. You probably didn't mean it that way, but it felt to me like you were trying to give back my skills, too. Even more than the letter, it was truly the best apology you could have offered.

The brokenness in me is not fixed yet, but I think that it's going to be, sooner or later. Today is Sunday, the day after you sent the box. Some of my friends are going to get together at one of the better courts in Tokyo this afternoon and play for a while. I had planned to just sit on the sidelines and watch, but I think instead I will take my basketball along and try to join in. I know everyone will be kind and patient with me, even if I fumble, so I am not afraid of failure.

Thank you for the blanket and the pot. I slept under the blanket last night, and I didn't dream at all. We have put the pot in a place of honor in the main room. It reminds me, as well as Hiroshi-san and Taiga-nii, of where I came from. It tells us of the love that bore me and the love that let me come to them. I will never forget Mother. And I will never forget you.

Good-bye, Father. Be well. I hope you find a good life, even though it will be without me from now on.

Sincerely,
Kagami Tetsuya