Chapter 4: What the Letter Said
The handwriting was slow and deliberate, the way a person writes when every word costs something.
*Margaret,*
*I have owed you this letter for fifty-three years.
I am sorry it took me this long to find the courage.*
*The afternoon I left, I did not choose to leave you.
My mother came to me the morning before and told me she had spoken with your father.
She said they had agreed — that I was not good enough for you, that I had no prospects, no money, no future worth giving you.
She said your father had already arranged for you to go to the city.
She said if I loved you, I would let you go.*
*I was nineteen.
I believed her.*
*I wrote the letter because I thought it was the kindest thing I could do.
I thought disappearing was the same as setting you free.*
*I spent the next twenty years trying to become the man they said I wasn't.
I built something.
I did well.
And by the time I understood what I had done — what we had both lost — you were already married.
You looked happy.
Harold looked like a good man.
I told myself I had no right to walk back into your life and disturb what you had built.*
*So I watched.
From a distance.
I know how that sounds.
I am not asking you to forgive it.*
*The photographs in this room are not meant to frighten you.
They are the only way I knew how to stay close to you without hurting you.
Every one of them was taken from a public place.
I never followed you.
I only looked, when I happened to find myself nearby.
Which was more often than I should admit.*
*The documents on the table are yours.
The garage is yours.
What is inside the garage — beneath the floor, under the third board from the left wall — is also yours.
I should have given it to you fifty years ago.
I am giving it to you now.*
*I asked you to marry me because I wanted one thing on this earth to be right before I left it.
You gave me that.
You gave me more than I deserved.*
*I love you, Margaret.
I always did.
I never stopped.*
*Walter*
I read it three times.
Mr.
Calloway stood near the door and said nothing.
That was the right thing to do.
When I finally looked up, my face was wet and I didn't remember when that had started.
"The third board," I said.
"Yes."
"Did you know what's under it?"
"Walter told me enough to prepare the paperwork," he said carefully.
"He wanted you to find it yourself."
I folded the letter back into thirds.
I put it in my coat pocket, against my chest.
Then I stood up — slowly, because my knees were not nineteen years old — and I walked to the left wall and began counting boards.
One.
Two.
Three.
I pressed down on the third board.
It rocked slightly, loose at one end.
I worked my fingers under the edge and lifted.
Beneath it was a metal box, the kind used for fireproofing documents.
It was locked with a small combination dial.
There was a second note taped to the lid, three words only:
*Your birthday.
Month, day, year.*
I stood there for a long moment.
Then I dialed in the numbers.
My own birthday.
A date Walter had apparently carried in his memory for more than half a century.
The lock clicked open.
May you like
I lifted the lid.
And then I understood what Richard had read on page three — and why it had made him go so quiet.
