She’d watched me from a distance.
She’d dialed my number, listened to the first ring, then hung up.
She wrote:“I don’t know how to explain what I did in a way that doesn’t make you hate me, so I’ve been waiting until I figure that out. Years keep passing faster than I expected.”
The last letter in the box was dated eight months before she died.
***
The handwriting was shakier. Like it cost more.
“I spent thirty years wondering if you’d forgive me. I never found the courage to ask.”
The handwriting was shakier.
Ashley came back the next morning with a photograph.
A woman and an older man, standing outside a diner somewhere I didn’t recognize. The woman was Lily, older, maybe fifteen years ago.
The man beside her had aged into someone I almost didn’t recognize.
Almost.
“That’s her brother,” I said. “That’s Thomas.”
“That’s her brother.”
***
Thomas, who had stood at Lily’s funeral with his face so closed down I couldn’t read it. Thomas, who told me the story of the river accident so many times in the weeks after that it had the quality of something rehearsed. Thomas, whom I’d quietly resented for thirty years for not saving her.
“He’s still alive,” Ashley said. “He lives about two hours from here. Mom visited him every year.”
We drove out on a Thursday morning.
Thomas was sixty-something now, white-haired, moving carefully through a small house with a garden that had seen better years. When he saw Ashley, something in his face went soft and sad at once.
