Chapter 8: Two Hours Away
The address was a street of narrow terraced houses on the edge of a quiet town.
I sat in the car outside for several minutes.
I didn't know what I was going to say.
I had rehearsed versions of it on the drive and discarded all of them.
There was no clean way to begin.
I knocked on the door.
Alina answered it.
She looked at me for a long moment without speaking.
She had cut her hair shorter than I remembered.
She was thinner.
She was wearing a cardigan with a coffee stain near the cuff that she hadn't noticed yet.
She looked like someone who had been living carefully, quietly, in a life that was smaller than the one she was supposed to have.
"Daniel," she said.
"Can I come in?" I said.
She stepped back from the door.
The house was small and very clean.
There were children's drawings on the refrigerator — from her students, I assumed.
A bookshelf with paperbacks stacked two deep.
A mug of tea going cold on the kitchen table.
She didn't offer me a seat.
She stood on the other side of the table with her arms crossed and looked at me with an expression I couldn't read.
"How did you find me?" she said.
"My brother," I said.
"Alina — I found the letters."
Something moved across her face.
"Which letters."
"All of them.
The box in the shoe cabinet.
Fourteen envelopes." I paused.
"She hid them.
I didn't know.
I told Sofia you stopped writing and I was wrong and I am so sorry."
Alina put one hand flat on the table.
"You told Sofia I stopped writing," she said.
"I thought you had.
I thought—" I stopped.
"I was wrong.
I should have looked harder.
I should have questioned it.
I didn't, and I am sorry."
She was quiet for a long moment.
"Is Sofia all right?" she said.
Her voice was careful.
Controlled.
"She's with Marcus.
She's safe." I paused.
"Alina, I need to tell you what we found.
About Veronica.
About the drive she kept.
About what she did to you and to Patrick and what she was planning."
Alina looked up at me.
"I know what she did," she said.
"I've known for a year.
I just couldn't prove it.
And I didn't think you would believe me."
"I believe you," I said.
She sat down slowly.
I sat across from her.
Outside the window a neighbor's cat crossed the small garden and disappeared under the fence.
"Tell me what you found," she said.
I told her everything.
The footage.
The altered messages.
The forged signature.
The emails to the attorney going back four years.
She listened without interrupting, her hands folded on the table, her face very still.
When I finished she was quiet for a moment.
"Four years," she said.
"Before we even married."
She nodded slowly, as if something she had always half-believed was finally being confirmed.
"I spent a long time thinking I must have done something wrong," she said.
"That I must have missed something obvious.
That I was stupid." She looked at me.
"She was very good."
"She was," I said.
"But she kept everything.
And that was her mistake."
Alina looked out the window.
"What do you need from me?" she said.
"I need you to speak to Marcus's colleague.
A forensics analyst.
And I need to know if you're willing to come forward — to give a statement about what she told you, what she showed you, what she threatened."
A long pause.
"If I do that," Alina said, "I want to see Sofia."
"Yes," I said.
"Not eventually.
Not after the legal process.
I want to see her."
"I'll bring her to you this weekend," I said.
"I promise."
Alina looked at me for a moment.
Then she stood up and went to the counter and poured her cold tea into the sink and refilled the kettle.
"Do you want tea?" she said.
"Yes," I said.
"Please."
We sat at that small kitchen table for two hours.
She told me everything — the day Veronica had appeared at her door, the photographs laid out on the table, the calm certainty in Veronica's voice.
The way she had felt the ground disappear beneath her.
The months of letters she had written not knowing if they were being read.
I listened to all of it.
When I finally stood to leave, Alina walked me to the door.
"Daniel," she said.
"The last letter I wrote — the one addressed to you.
Did you read the end of it?"
"Yes," I said.
She nodded.
"Then you know she told me she loved you.
That she had always loved you." She paused.
"I used to think that made her sympathetic somehow.
That love made people do terrible things." She looked at me steadily.
"It doesn't.
Love doesn't make you forge someone's signature.
Love doesn't make you threaten a child.
May you like
That's just who she is."
I drove back with that sentence in the car the whole way home.
