Chapter 3: What Peter Knew
Peter didn't sit down.
He stayed by the window, one hand in his pocket, the other pressed flat against the glass.
Outside, the hospital parking lot was grey and ordinary.
Nothing out there matched what was happening in this room.
"Tell her," Jeffrey said.
"Dad—"
"Peter.
Tell her."
Peter turned.
He looked at me the way people look at someone they've been thinking about for a long time without ever meeting.
"When my father got sick last year," he said, "he asked me to go through some old boxes in the attic.
Things from before he married my mother.
He wanted to sort out what to keep."
I was still holding my mother's letter.
I set it down on the edge of the bed.
"I found a second envelope," Peter said.
"Same handwriting as that one.
Same return address.
Dated two weeks earlier — June third, 1986."
My throat tightened.
"What did it say?"
Peter reached into his jacket and pulled out a folded piece of paper.
Newer paper — a photocopy.
He held it out to me.
I didn't take it right away.
Some part of me already understood that whatever was on that page would divide my life into before and after.
I took it.
The handwriting was my mother's.
I would know it anywhere — the looping G, the way she pressed hard on the downstrokes.
*"Jeffrey, I am writing to ask you directly what your intentions are toward my daughter.
Ruth has never said a word to me, but a mother knows.
If you are serious, then say so.
If you are not, then I am asking you, as a gentleman, to step back before she is hurt beyond repair.
She deserves someone who will choose her without hesitation."*
I read it twice.
"She wrote to him twice," I said.
"Yes."
"The first letter was asking him to be honest." I looked up at Peter.
"And the second one said I didn't feel anything."
"Three weeks later.
After he didn't respond to the first one."
The room shifted.
I sat down in the chair beside Jeffrey's bed — the same chair that had held the wooden box — and I tried to put it in order.
My mother writing to Jeffrey in secret.
Waiting three weeks for an answer that never came.
And then, in what I could only imagine was a kind of desperate protection, writing again.
Telling him to go.
Telling him I didn't care.
"She thought you weren't going to choose me," I said quietly.
"She was trying to save me from waiting for someone who wouldn't come."
Jeffrey's hand found mine again.
"I know."
"She didn't know you'd already bought the ring."
"No." His voice was barely there.
"She didn't know.
And I didn't know she was doing any of it."
"Why didn't you write back to the first letter?"
A long silence.
"Because I was twenty years old and terrified," Jeffrey said.
"I read it and I panicked.
I thought — if her mother is asking, then Ruth must have said something.
And if Ruth said something, then maybe she was waiting for me to make a move.
And I was so afraid of getting it wrong that I didn't answer at all." His jaw tightened.
"Three weeks of silence.
And then her second letter arrived."
I closed my eyes.
Two people.
Two letters.
Three weeks of silence in between.
And forty-one years on the other side of it.
"She never told me any of this," I said.
"Not once."
"I know," Jeffrey said.
"I believe that."
Peter spoke carefully.
"There's one more thing."
I opened my eyes.
He reached into his jacket again.
This time he pulled out a small photograph.
Colour, slightly faded.
A woman I didn't recognise, standing outside what looked like a church.
"That's my mother," Peter said.
"On their wedding day."
I looked at the photo.
A pretty woman.
Dark hair.
Nervous smile.
"My parents' marriage wasn't easy," Peter said.
"My father was kind to her.
He was always kind.
But she knew." He paused.
"She told me, the year before she passed, that she always knew there was someone else.
Not that he ever said a name.
But she knew."
Jeffrey made a sound that wasn't quite a word.
"She didn't blame him," Peter said.
"She said — she said she hoped he'd find a way to make it right before the end."
The photograph sat in my hand, this stranger's face looking up at me, and I felt something I hadn't expected.
Not anger.
Not even sadness, exactly.
Something closer to sorrow for everyone in the room, and everyone who wasn't.
"She sounds like she was a good woman," I said.
"She was," Peter said.
"She really was."
Jeffrey turned his head toward the window.
His shoulders moved once.
I held his hand and didn't say anything.
Sometimes there is nothing to say that the silence doesn't say better.
After a long moment, Jeffrey spoke.
"Ruthie."
"I'm here."
"I need to ask you something." His grip tightened slightly.
"And I need you to be honest with me.
The way we always were."
"All right."
He turned back to look at me.
His eyes were the same.
Forty-one years and illness and everything in between, and his eyes were still the same.
"If you had known," he said.
"If none of this had happened — the letters, the silence, all of it.
If I had come to your door that summer with the ring." He stopped.
"What would you have said?"
The question sat in the air between us.
I didn't look away.
"You know what I would have said."
His eyes filled.
He nodded once, slowly, like a man setting something down that he'd been carrying for a very long time.
From the doorway, Peter's voice came quietly.
"There's one more letter," he said.
"The last one.
Dad only found it six months ago." A pause.
"It wasn't in the box.
May you like
It was somewhere else entirely.
And when you read it, you'll understand why none of this was as simple as any of us thought."
