‘These are from my husband,’she signs.‘He wrote me letters. Every week, from the day we met until the day he died.’
I reach for the nearest one carefully, reverently. The ink is a deep blue-black, the kind that comes from a quality fountain pen, and the handwriting is precise but warm, like the writer was someone who cared about craft but cared about the recipient more.
‘He always said—’Lady Hampton pauses, her hands hovering in the air like she’s choosing her next words carefully.‘He said the world was too loud and too fast, and the only way to slow it down was to put pen to paper. To make someone feel that their words mattered enough to answer slowly, carefully, beautifully.’
My eyes are stinging. I think about my mom’s Sunday letters from Johannesburg, written with a fountain pen on whatever stationery she can find, and I understand completely what Lady Hampton’s husband meant.
‘That’s what the Hampton collection is really about,’she continues.‘Not the pens. Not the ink. The connection. The act of sitting down and choosing to give someone your time and your words.’
‘That’s beautiful,’I sign, and I mean it so deeply it hurts.
Lady Hampton takes the letter back gently and tucks it into the portfolio. Then she looks at me with an expression I can’t quite read, something knowing, something almost conspiratorial, and signs,‘My son writes letters too, you know.’
I blink.‘Veil writes letters?’
‘To his father.’Her smile’s tender and a little sad.‘Every Sunday. Has done since the funeral. He thinks I don’t know, but I’ve seen him. In the study, at the desk, writing with his father’s favorite pen.’
I don’t know what to do with this information. The image of Veil, guarded and cynical and impossible Veil, sitting alone every Sunday writing letters to his dead father is so at odds with the man who ambushed me at a calligraphy workshop that I can’t reconcile the two.
‘He’s more like his father than he knows,’Lady Hampton shares.‘Or maybe he does know, and that’s what scares him.’
She pats my hand, rises from the sofa, and gathers her tea and portfolio. ‘Get some rest,’ she signs.‘Tomorrow is the ice skating exhibition, and I’ll need you sharp.’
‘Geena?’I sign as she reaches the doorway.
She turns, eyebrows raised.
‘Thank you. For telling me about the letters. And for...’I don’t know how to finish the sentence. For being kind. For seeing me. For making me feel like I belong here even when I’m clearly falling apart.‘For everything.’
Her smile deepens into something warm and certain, that same Mona Lisa expression I noticed on the plane, like she knows something I don’t, and she gives me a small nod before disappearing down the hall.
I sit there in the quiet sitting room for a long time after she’s gone, thinking about letters and love and the kind of man who writes to his dead father every Sunday.
And then my phone buzzes.
Not Joseph this time.
An unknown number, and the message is just two words:
Sleep well.
I stare at the screen, my pulse quickening, because there’s only one person at this estate who could have gotten my number without asking me for it.
And he just made it very clear that even when I’m not in the room, I’m still on his mind.
