Chapter 12: Carol
Carol Merritt lived in a small apartment near the river, on the fourth floor of a building with a slow elevator and a lobby that smelled like old carpet and someone's good cooking.
She opened the door before we knocked.
She was a small woman, seventyish, with white hair cut short and reading glasses pushed up on her forehead.
She looked at me for a moment with the expression of someone who has been imagining a face for a long time and is now adjusting the image to match the reality.
"Patricia," she said.
Not Mrs.
Holland.
Patricia.
"Carol," I said.
She stepped back and let us in.
The apartment was full of books and plants and the particular organized clutter of someone who lives alone and has made peace with it.
She had set out a plate of shortbread on the coffee table.
There was tea already steeping.
We sat.
She poured.
"I tried to reach you twice," she said.
"After I wrote the letter.
I felt terrible when you didn't respond.
Gerald kept telling me you had probably decided to leave it alone, and I kept thinking — no, she doesn't know.
She would respond if she knew."
"He intercepted the letters," I said.
"I never saw them."
She set down the teapot.
"I thought as much," she said quietly.
"Eventually.
But by then Gerald was ill, and I — I let it go.
I shouldn't have."
"You did what you could," I said.
"I could have done more." She said it simply, without drama.
"I've had a long time to sit with that."
"So have I," I said.
"With other things."
She looked at me.
"How are you?" she asked.
Not as a formality.
As a real question.
I thought about it.
"I'm angry," I said.
"I think I'll be angry for a while.
But I'm also — clearer than I've been in years.
Maybe ever." I paused.
"Does that make sense?"
"Perfect sense," she said.
Dylan was sitting slightly apart from us, his tea untouched, giving us the space the conversation needed.
"Gerald would have liked you," Carol said.
"He was a straightforward man.
He believed in things being what they appeared to be.
When your husband approached him with that proposal, he came home and told me that same evening.
He said, *That man is rotten at the center and he knows it, which makes him dangerous.* He was right."
"Your husband kept records for years," I said.
"Why?"
"Because he knew someday someone would need them," she said simply.
"He didn't know who.
He didn't know when.
But he believed the truth had a way of needing to surface eventually, and he wanted to make sure it had something to stand on when it did."
I thought about that.
A man I had never met, keeping careful notes for years on behalf of a woman he didn't know, because he believed the truth deserved to be documented.
"Thank you," I said.
"For everything Gerald kept.
And for finding Dylan."
"Dylan found me, really," she said.
"I had been trying to locate him for years.
He called me out of the blue one afternoon and I nearly fell off my chair." She glanced at Dylan with warmth.
"He's a good man.
Whatever his father was, he's a good man."
Dylan looked at the carpet.
"He is," I said.
We stayed for two hours.
We talked about Gerald, about Carol's life in Portland, about the reading program Nora was going to build.
Carol wanted to contribute to it herself — a modest amount, she said, but something.
Dylan wrote down the details.
When we finally stood to leave, Carol walked us to the door.
She hugged Dylan first.
Then she turned to me.
She took both my hands in hers and held them for a moment.
"You deserved better," she said.
"For all of it.
Every year of it."
My throat tightened.
"So did you," I said.
"For trying."
She squeezed my hands once and let go.
In the elevator going down, Dylan and I stood side by side without speaking.
The lobby doors opened onto the street.
The air was cool and smelled like the river.
"Ready?" Dylan said.
May you like
"Yes," I said.
And I meant it in more ways than one.
