Chapter 6: What He Carried
Diane was already there when I arrived.
She was older than she'd looked at the funeral — mid-seventies, I guessed, small-framed with silver hair cut short.
She was sitting at a corner table with both hands wrapped around a coffee cup, and when she saw me come through the door, she stood up.
She didn't try to hug me.
I was grateful for that.
"Thank you for coming," she said.
I sat down across from her.
A waitress appeared and I ordered coffee I didn't want.
On the table between us, Diane had placed a large envelope.
Cream-colored, sealed.
"Before I explain anything," she said, "I want to say something first.
What Greg and I had was a friendship.
I know that might be hard to believe.
I know how the note looked.
But I need you to know that I respected your marriage.
I respected you — even though we never met."
"He told you about me," I said.
"Often." She almost smiled.
"He said you were the most capable person he'd ever known.
He said you handled everything — the house, the finances, the children — and made it look effortless.
He said he didn't tell you that enough."
My throat tightened.
I looked at my coffee cup.
"What's in the envelope?" I said.
Diane's hands moved to it, then stopped.
"When we were seventeen," she said, "I got pregnant."
The coffee shop noise continued around us.
Someone laughed at the counter.
A child at a nearby table dropped a spoon.
"Greg was the father," she said.
"We were young.
Terrified.
My parents didn't know.
His parents didn't know.
We decided — I decided — that I couldn't keep the baby.
Greg drove me to the appointment.
He held my hand.
He paid for everything he could with money he'd saved from a summer job." She paused.
"Afterward, I fell apart.
And Greg — seventeen years old — he stayed.
He came every day for two weeks until I was steadier.
And then we went our separate ways, because that's what young people do."
I didn't say anything.
"I never told Thomas," she said.
"I never told my daughter.
Greg asked me, when we reconnected, to let him keep it.
He said he felt responsible.
He said he'd carried it for forty years and he wanted to keep carrying it so I didn't have to anymore." Her voice was very quiet.
"That was the promise."
"He never told me," I said.
"No.
He was afraid — not that you'd judge him.
He was afraid you'd feel like there was a part of his life you hadn't been given.
He said that wasn't fair to you, and he was going to tell you.
He just kept waiting for the right moment."
I looked at the envelope.
"What's in there?"
"He wrote you a letter," Diane said.
"A real one.
Not like the note.
He gave it to me about two months before the accident and asked me to hold it.
He said — he said if anything ever happened to him before he found the right words, he wanted you to have it." She slid the envelope across the table.
"He said you'd know what to do with the truth."
I put my hand on it.
The paper was thick.
Whatever was inside was more than one page.
"Did he know?" I said.
"That something might happen to him?"
"I think he felt time differently after the chest scare," she said.
"I think he started taking things more seriously."
I looked at her across the table.
This woman who had known my husband when he was a boy.
Who had carried something painful for decades.
Who had asked about me by name in her very first letter.
"He was a good man," I said.
It wasn't a question.
Her eyes filled.
She didn't let the tears fall.
"He was one of the best people I ever knew," she said.
"And he loved you.
That was never in any doubt.
Not once."
I picked up the envelope.
I didn't open it there.
I wasn't ready for that yet.
But I held it all the way to the car, and I held it on the seat beside me on the drive home, and I thought about a seventeen-year-old boy who had shown up every day for two weeks because someone needed him to.
I had married that boy.
I just hadn't known all of him until now.
The lawyer's appointment was tomorrow.
I still didn't know what Greg had changed in his will, or why, or what Raymond Chu needed to tell me in person.
I set the envelope on the kitchen table when I got home.
I made tea.
May you like
I sat down.
And I opened it.
