Chapter 5: Thirty Letters
The earliest letter was dated four years ago, March.
*Dear Greg,*
*Thank you for writing.
I almost didn't open it — I didn't recognize the email address and I've been deleting everything that isn't essential.
But something made me open yours.
I'm glad I did.*
*I'm not doing well, if I'm honest.
The house is too quiet.
Thomas was a loud man — you'd have liked him — and now the quiet feels like something pressing on my chest.*
*How are you?
How is Ellen?*
I stopped.
She had asked about me.
In the very first letter, she had asked about me by name.
I kept reading.
The letters moved in and out of grief, memory, ordinary life.
Diane wrote about her garden, her daughter in Portland, a trip she'd taken to see the coast.
Greg's replies — I couldn't read those, they weren't there — must have matched her rhythm, because her responses tracked his moods.
When he was tired, she wrote shorter.
When something was troubling him, her letters grew longer, more careful.
About eighteen months in, something shifted.
*Greg, you've mentioned the chest pain twice now and I need you to hear me: please go to the doctor.
Not next month.
This week.
Thomas said the same thing — "I'll go after the holidays" — and I think about that every single day.*
I set the letter down.
Greg had told her about the chest pain.
He had never told me.
I sat with that for a moment.
The bedroom was very still.
I picked up the next letter.
Three months later.
Her handwriting slightly faster, less composed.
*I'm so relieved it was nothing serious.
Please don't frighten me like that again.
And please tell Ellen.
She deserves to know these things, Greg.
I mean that kindly.*
She had told him to tell me.
I read that sentence three times.
The later letters changed again.
More reflective.
Less about daily life, more about the past.
She wrote about the summer they were seventeen, a lake somewhere in Vermont, a promise he'd made her that she'd thought about for decades.
I found the letter that explained the promise near the bottom of the bundle.
*You asked me once if I ever told anyone.
I never did.
Not Thomas, not my daughter, not anyone.
You asked me to let you carry it and I let you, and I've spent forty years wondering if that was the right thing.
Now you're asking me again — to keep carrying it, to let you take it with you.
I don't know, Greg.
I don't know if silence is still the right answer.*
*But I trust you.
I always have.
So yes.
I'll keep the promise.*
I read it twice.
Then once more.
*Let you carry it.*
Carry what?
The last letter in the bundle was dated six weeks before the accident.
Her handwriting was different — slower, like she'd been choosing every word.
*Greg, I've been thinking about what you said.
About Ellen.
You're right that she's stronger than you give her credit for.
You're right that she would understand.
But that has to be your decision, not mine.
I won't make it for you.*
*Whatever you decide, I want you to know: what you did for me, all those years ago, was one of the kindest things anyone has ever done.
I never forgot it.
I never will.*
*Take care of yourself.
Give my best to Ellen, even if she doesn't know it's from me.*
*— D*
I folded the last letter carefully and set it back in the box.
Outside, the wind had picked up.
A branch tapped against the bedroom window.
Greg had been carrying something for forty years.
Something Diane knew.
Something his lawyer knew.
Something he had almost told me — and then run out of time.
Tomorrow I would meet Diane.
The day after, Raymond Chu.
I closed the box and put it on the nightstand.
May you like
I didn't sleep for a long time.
But when I finally did, I dreamed about a lake in Vermont I had never seen, and a boy of seventeen making a promise he intended to keep for the rest of his life.
