Chapter 6: What She Had Written and What He Had Taken
Chloe made tea.
I didn't ask her to.
She simply went to the kitchen, found the kettle, found the cups, and came back with three of them on a tray.
She set one in front of David without looking at him.
She handed one to me with both hands, the way you hand something to someone who might be shaking.
I was shaking.
I hadn't noticed until the warm cup was in my hands.
I read the rest of the letters while Chloe sat across from me and David sat in the armchair and said nothing.
The sixth letter was from six years ago.
Chloe had written it after she got engaged — a man named Patrick, she said, someone who made her feel safe.
She had wanted to tell me.
She said she had thought about inviting me to the wedding, but she hadn't known how I felt about her, and she hadn't wanted to be rejected again.
She had gotten married without me there.
I set the letter down.
"You got married," I said.
"Four years ago," she said.
"Patrick and I have a daughter.
She's two."
I looked up.
"Her name is Rose," Chloe said.
"I named her after my mother."
Something moved through my chest that I couldn't name.
"I have a grandchild," I said.
Not to anyone in particular.
"Technically, a step-grandchild," Chloe said.
And then, more quietly: "But yes."
I picked up the seventh letter.
This one was shorter than the others — just a few lines, written about three years ago.
The handwriting was different.
Tighter.
Like she had written it quickly, before she could change her mind.
*Alice, I don't know if you're even reading these.
I don't know if Dad is giving them to you and you're choosing not to respond, or if something else is happening.
But I need to say this one more time: I never blamed you.
I blamed him.
And I'm sorry you got caught in the middle of something that was never your fault.*
*If you ever want to meet, I would like that.*
*— Chloe*
I folded that letter back along its crease very carefully.
"I would have come," I said.
"If I had received a single one of these, I would have come."
Chloe nodded.
Her eyes were bright but she didn't cry.
She had the look of someone who had already done their crying about this — alone, in private, over a long period of time.
"I know that now," she said.
I looked at David.
He was watching the two of us with an expression I couldn't fully read — grief, maybe, or something close to it.
The particular grief of a man watching the damage he caused being measured out in real time.
"Why did you keep them?" I asked him.
"The letters.
Why not just destroy them?"
He thought about it for a moment.
"I don't know," he said.
"I kept telling myself I'd give them to you eventually.
When the time was right.
When things were—" He stopped.
"Easier for you," I said.
He didn't argue.
"There are emails too," Chloe said.
She nodded toward the USB drive on the coffee table.
"Fourteen of them.
Over nine years.
The last one I sent was eight months ago, after he called me and told me about his heart." She paused.
"I wrote to you then because I thought — if something happened to him — you should know the truth before it was too late to ask him yourself."
I picked up the USB drive.
It was small and light, the kind of thing you could lose in a coat pocket and forget about.
Fourteen emails.
Eleven letters.
Twenty-five attempts to reach me across twelve years of silence.
And David had stood in the middle of all of it, holding the door closed.
"I want to read the emails," I said.
"They're all there," Chloe said.
I set the drive back on the table.
I would read them.
But not tonight, and not with David in the room.
I looked at my husband.
"I think," I said, very carefully, "that you should go and stay with your brother for a few days."
He looked up sharply.
"Alice—"
"I'm not asking you to leave permanently.
I'm asking you to give me space to think." I kept my voice level.
"You've had twelve years to manage this.
I've had two hours.
I need time."
He looked at Chloe.
She looked back at him without expression.
He stood up slowly.
He picked up his keys from the side table where he always left them.
He walked to the door and stopped with his hand on the frame.
"I am sorry," he said.
"I know that doesn't fix anything."
"No," I said.
"It doesn't."
He left.
The door clicked shut behind him.
May you like
Chloe and I sat in the quiet for a moment.
Then she reached over and topped up my tea from the pot she'd brought through, and I let her, and neither of us said anything, and somehow that was exactly right.
