Chapter 4: Everything He Should Have Said
The candles were still burning.
The flowers were still there.
The ribbon on the end of every pew, the white chairs, the little printed programmes with both our names on them — Monica and Leo — and I stood looking at that name on the programme in my hand and felt something shift in my chest that I didn't have a word for yet.
"Say it again," I said.
"Your actual name."
"Daniel.
Daniel Robert Marsh."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-seven."
"Leo would have been twenty-nine."
"Yes."
I set the programme down on the altar rail.
I didn't throw it.
I just set it down.
"When did he die?"
Daniel was quiet for a moment.
"Two years after we moved.
He was nine.
His heart." He paused.
"He was born with something wrong with it.
My parents knew.
They moved partly because of the hospital — there was a specialist two towns over.
It didn't help."
"Your parents knew he was dying when they left."
"Yes."
"And nobody told me.
Nobody on our street.
Nobody left a note."
"My mother couldn't —" He stopped.
Started again.
"She couldn't talk about it.
She still can't, not really.
She packed the house in four days and she didn't say goodbye to anyone because she said if she stopped moving she would fall apart and never get up."
I thought about my mother at the kitchen table.
You're waiting for a ghost, Monica.
She hadn't known how right she was.
"Why did you come to the bakery?" I said.
"After all this time.
Why come at all?"
"Because I promised him." His voice was steady now, in the way that things are steady when they have been held rigid for a very long time.
"And because I'd spent twenty years thinking about the girl in that photograph.
The one who stood in the driveway until the car was gone.
Leo told me about you every single day until he couldn't anymore.
He said you were the bravest person he'd ever met because you never cried in front of anyone."
"I cried plenty."
"I know.
He said you did it in the oak tree so nobody would see."
My hand went to my mouth before I could stop it.
"He watched you," Daniel said.
"From his bedroom window.
He said you climbed up there three times the week after we left.
He felt terrible about it for the rest of his life.
He made me promise to tell you that."
The candle nearest to me guttered in a draft from somewhere.
"You should have told me the truth the moment you walked into that bakery."
"Yes."
"You should have said — I'm his brother, he asked me to find you, I'm sorry for what happened."
"Yes."
"Instead you let me fall in love with a name that belongs to a nine-year-old boy who's been gone for twenty years."
His face didn't change.
He didn't try to argue with that.
"Yes," he said again.
"I did.
And I'm sorry.
I've been trying to find the right moment to tell you the truth for two years and there is no right moment for something like this.
There is no version of this conversation that doesn't hurt you.
I know that.
I knew it the whole time.
And I kept going anyway because I was a coward and because I loved you and I told myself those two things could somehow exist at the same time."
"They can't."
"No." He looked at his hands.
"They can't."
The silence stretched between us.
Outside, faintly, I could hear the murmur of a hundred and six people standing in a car park not knowing what to do.
"What happens now?" I said.
"That's up to you." He reached into his jacket pocket again.
This time he took out a small envelope, cream-coloured, sealed.
My name on the front in handwriting I didn't recognise.
"Leo wrote this when he was eight.
My mother kept it.
She gave it to me the morning I went to find you." He placed it on the altar rail beside the programme.
"I was supposed to give it to you before I ever said my own name.
That was the plan.
That was what I was supposed to do."
I looked at the envelope.
"Why didn't you?"
He was quiet for a long moment.
"Because I was afraid that once you read it, you'd only ever see him when you looked at me."
I picked up the envelope.
The paper was thin with age, the seal still intact.
Outside, a car door slammed.
Then another.
I looked up at Daniel — at this man whose name I was only just learning — and I said the only true thing I had left.
"I need you to go.
I need to read this alone."
He nodded.
He walked to the end of the aisle.
At the door he stopped, one hand on the frame, and didn't turn around.
"His name was Leo James Marsh," he said.
"He was the best person I ever knew.
And he loved you first.
I just loved you longer."
May you like
The door swung shut behind him.
I sat down on the altar step in my wedding dress, and I opened the letter.
