Chapter 4: The Letters in the Drawer
The study was the one room in our house that had always been his.
I knocked before entering for twenty years out of habit.
I didn't knock this time.
The desk was neat.
Richard was always neat.
Files stacked, pens in a cup, the small brass lamp he'd had since before we met.
I went to the bottom drawer on the right side.
I don't know why I chose that one.
I just did.
It was locked.
I stood there looking at it.
Richard appeared in the doorway behind me.
"Ellen."
"Key."
"Let me explain first."
"Key, Richard."
He crossed the room, opened the top drawer, and lifted a small key from beneath a folded piece of paper.
He held it out.
I took it.
The lock turned easily.
Inside: a brown envelope, thick with folded pages.
No label.
No name on the outside.
Just the envelope, sitting at the bottom of the drawer like it had been waiting.
I lifted it out and sat down in his chair.
He stood across from me.
I opened the envelope.
There were eleven letters.
I didn't count them then — I counted them later, alone.
But I could feel the weight of them, the years of them, as I unfolded the first one.
Carol's handwriting was small and careful.
*Richard, I'm not writing to ask for anything.
I just thought you should know that Eli started school this week.
He's bright.
He asks a lot of questions.
He has your eyes, I think, though I try not to look for you in him too much.*
I set it down.
I picked up another.
*He's seven now.
He had a bad year — I won't go into it.
I just wanted you to know he's all right.*
Another.
*He asked me once if he had a father.
I told him yes.
He asked if his father knew about him.
I told him yes.
He didn't ask anything else.
I don't know if that's good or bad.*
I stopped reading.
"She wrote to you for how long?"
Richard was leaning against the doorframe.
He looked smaller than usual.
"Fifteen years.
Maybe sixteen."
"And you never responded."
"No."
"Not once."
"No."
I looked at the envelope in my hands.
"She raised him alone for twenty years, wrote to you for sixteen of them, and you never once wrote back."
"I sent money.
Early on.
She sent it back."
"She sent it back," I repeated.
"She didn't want money.
She said so.
She just — she wanted me to know he was alive."
"And you couldn't even give her that.
An acknowledgment.
A single line."
He said nothing.
Caitlin appeared in the doorway beside him.
She'd been listening from the hall.
I could see it in her face — the way she was looking at her father, like she was trying to find the man she thought she knew and couldn't locate him anymore.
"Dad," she said.
"He's been alone since she d*ed.
Eight months.
He's twenty years old and he's been completely alone."
Richard looked at her.
"He found your letters in her things," Caitlin said.
"He came here because he had nowhere else to go.
And you told him to leave."
The silence that followed was the loudest thing in the room.
I put the letters back in the envelope.
I stood up.
I walked to the doorway, where Caitlin stepped aside to let me pass.
"Where are you going?" Richard asked.
"To talk to Eli."
"Ellen—"
I stopped but didn't turn around.
"You've had twenty years to decide what kind of man you were going to be about this.
May you like
You made your choice every single year." I started walking again.
"It's not your turn anymore."
