Chapter 5: The Daughter at the Door
She was thirty years old now.
I had not seen her since she was seventeen.
She looked like her father around the eyes.
She looked like someone who had driven a long way and was not entirely sure she had made the right decision by stopping.
She looked at me first.
Then at David.
Then at the letters spread across the carpet.
"You opened the box," she said.
Her voice was directed at me, not at him.
"Yes," I said.
She stepped inside and closed the door behind her.
She didn't take her coat off.
She stood just inside the entrance with her bag still on her shoulder, like she was keeping her options open.
"I wasn't sure you would," she said.
"I thought maybe Dad would find a way to—" She stopped.
She looked at him.
"Did you try?"
David stood up.
"Chloe—"
"Did you try to stop her from opening it?"
"I didn't stop anything."
"That's not what I asked." She set her bag down on the floor.
Slowly.
Like she was making a decision.
"Did you try?"
He was quiet for a moment too long.
"I see," she said.
She crossed the room and sat down on the sofa — not next to me, not next to him, but in the middle, equidistant, like a woman who had learned not to choose sides prematurely.
She looked at the letters on the floor.
"How many did you read?" she asked me.
"Five so far," I said.
"There are more."
"Six more." She reached into her coat pocket and set something on the coffee table.
A small USB drive.
"And those are the emails.
From the account I set up specifically to write to you.
The ones he had forwarded to himself so they'd never reach your inbox."
I looked at David.
His jaw tightened.
"You had access to my email?" I said.
"He set up your account," Chloe said.
"When you two first moved in together.
Do you remember?
He offered to help you set it up."
I did remember.
I had thought it was kind.
I had not been particularly technical, and he had sat beside me at the kitchen table and walked me through the whole thing.
"He set up a forwarding rule," Chloe said.
"Anything from my address went to him first.
He deleted most of them.
A few he just — left in a folder you'd never find."
I sat back down.
Not because I was calm.
Because my legs had made the decision for me.
"How did you find out?" I asked her.
"He told me." She looked at her father.
"Two months ago.
He called me out of nowhere and told me everything.
He said he was sick." She paused.
"Are you going to tell her, or should I?"
The room went very quiet.
David looked at his hands.
"Tell me what?" I said.
Chloe watched her father for a long moment.
When he didn't speak, she turned to me.
"He was diagnosed in March," she said.
"His heart.
The doctors told him he needed surgery and that the recovery would be — uncertain.
He called me because he said he couldn't go into the operating room with all of this still buried." She looked at the box.
"He asked me to forgive him.
I told him forgiveness wasn't mine to give.
Not for what he'd done to you."
I looked at David.
He was still looking at his hands.
"When is the surgery?" I asked.
"Three weeks," he said quietly.
I stood up again.
I walked to the window.
Outside, the street looked exactly the same as it always did — same houses, same trees, same ordinary afternoon light.
Nothing outside had changed at all.
"You waited until you were afraid of dying," I said.
"That's when you decided to tell the truth."
He didn't deny it.
"Alice." His voice cracked slightly on my name.
"I know there is nothing I can say—"
May you like
"Then don't say anything yet." I turned around.
"I need to read the rest of the letters."
