Chapter 5: What the Letter Said
We didn't read it there.
We couldn't.
There were people waiting, and a service still to finish, and I knew — I knew the way you know things in your body before your mind catches up — that whatever was in that envelope needed four walls and no audience.
The rest of the service passed in a kind of gauze.
I heard words.
A hymn.
Someone who had coached Jack's under-fourteen football team stood up and talked about his left foot and his laugh.
A girl from his secondary school read a poem.
I held the envelope the entire time.
My husband kept glancing at it.
He didn't say anything.
Theo sat in the pew directly behind us for the rest of the service.
At some point his hand came forward and rested on my shoulder for a moment.
Then it withdrew.
When the last of the guests had gone and the funeral director had spoken to us about what happened next, we drove home.
Theo came with us.
He didn't ask.
He just got into the back seat.
My husband didn't say anything either.
He started the car.
We sat at the kitchen table.
I placed the envelope in the center, between the three of us, and for a moment no one moved.
"Do you want me to go?" Theo asked.
"No," I said.
My husband nodded once.
I opened it.
There were two pages inside, folded together.
I unfolded them and pressed them flat against the table, and I read.
I read it twice before I was able to speak.
"He says — " I stopped.
Cleared my throat.
"He says there's something he needs to tell us about the year he was nineteen.
The summer he went to stay with his cousin in Edinburgh."
My husband was very still.
"He says he met someone.
A girl.
He says — they were together for about four months, and he ended it because he was confused about who he was, and he handled it badly, and she told him she never wanted to hear from him again." I turned the page.
"He says she contacted him two years later.
When he was twenty-one.
She had a daughter.
The daughter was eighteen months old."
No one spoke.
"He says he wasn't sure.
He says they talked about it, and they didn't know how to handle it, and then he got sick, and he — " My voice went.
I waited.
"He says he's sorry he didn't tell us.
He says he was ashamed of how he'd handled it.
And he says he was afraid."
My husband's chair scraped back slightly.
"He says her name is Rachel.
And the little girl's name is — " I looked at the page.
I looked at it for a long time.
"Her name is Lily.
She's four years old."
Theo was looking at the table.
"He says Rachel knows he passed.
He says she called him three weeks before the end, and they talked, and she said she didn't want anything from us.
She said she'd never come looking." I turned the last page over.
"But he says he couldn't leave without giving us the choice.
He says — you're her grandparents.
That's real, whether or not you want it to be.
I'm not asking you to find her.
I'm asking you not to pretend she doesn't exist."
My husband stood up.
He walked to the window and stood with his back to us for a long time.
Theo didn't move.
I folded the letter back along its original creases.
I set it down.
"There's a phone number," I said quietly.
"At the bottom of the second page."
My husband turned around.
His face — I had seen that face through thirty-one years of marriage.
I had seen it frightened and proud and broken and soft.
I had never seen it look exactly like this.
"We have a granddaughter," he said.
It wasn't a question.
It wasn't disbelief.
It was a man saying a sentence out loud so that it could become real.
May you like
"We have a granddaughter," I said back.
Theo put his face in his hands.
