“Um . . . oh!” I say, struck with an idea that doesn’t seem all that good, but at least itisone. “Yes. Thank you for . . . your service?”
This feels awkward. I am obviously also against financial crimes, but you know. This seems kind of insistent, under the circumstances.
For the first time, she seems to take pity on me, or maybe that’s the face she makes when she’s trying not to laugh.
“Reid mentioned you to me earlier this spring,” she says.
“He did?”
She nods. “After you’d e-mailed him to meet. It was—that came at a critical time. Reid had met with us several times that week.”
“Oh.” I try to imagine what those meetings would have been like. Would they have been in a windowless room, one table, two chairs, Reid and an FBI agent facing each other beneath an industrial light fixture? Or would Reid have been ushered into a bland but comfortable conference room? Would they have poured him tea, spoken to him gently, encouragingly? I suppose I could ask Agent Tirmizi, but as with so many questions I have—I only want to ask them of Reid.
“I suggested he might want to take you up on your offer. To give himself some relief from all this.”
I blink down, let my eyes slide closed for a few seconds so I can think of Reid that first day at the Promenade. His weekend clothes, his stern face, his sad eyes.Someone did tell me recently I ought to try keeping my mind occupied.
I feel the weight of the letter in my hand, let the pad of my thumb pass over the exact spot where Reid has written my name. I wish he had pressed harder. I wish I could feel some relic of his hand’s movement over these letters. I notice that it’s not sealed, the envelope’s flap only tucked inside, and I look up at Agent Tirmizi.
“I read it,” she says, shrugging. “Following protocol, for his good and yours.”
“Of course,” I say, my face flushed, my fingers tight around the envelope.
“I always wanted my wife to write me love letters.”
My heartthunks thunks thunksin anticipation. Agent Tirmizi seems nice and all, and I’m sure it’s a disappointment about her wife, but I’d really like her to leave now. I’d really like to read this letter alone.
“She’s more of a Post-it note stuck to the refrigerator kind of woman.”
“Yeah,” I say, as though I know anything about her wife. I only want togo, but I suppose running from a literal FBI agent would be a poor decision. Anyway, I’m already tired from all the walking I did.
“A few years ago, though, she got me a book of them. Famous love letters.”
Wow, okay. Does she also want to give me an inventory of the contents of the refrigerator that her wife leaves the Post-its on? Or can I finally, please,pleasego upstairs and read this—
“What I’m saying is, I’ve read a lot of them.”
She has a small smile on her face that hints she’s been stalling me on purpose, making me sweat this. I hope they do put her in those windowless rooms sometimes to make the bad guys squirm. They probably leave with their eyelids looking like throw pillows, too. But I keep my eyes fixed on hers, my feet steady where I stand, and her smile widens briefly.
Approvingly.
She nods toward the letter, then looks me straight in the eye. “That one’s a good one.”
And when she turns to open the door of her car, I know she’s not just talking about the letter.
Chapter 21
Dear Meg,
Sending you this letter may be a mistake.
That’s what Agent Tirmizi told me when I asked her whether I could write to you. She reminded me, in stark terms, that I have caused a great deal of difficulty in your life, difficulty you were not able to prepare for or decide for yourself. She has warned me that all this means you might have reason not to keep a letter from me private, that you might have reason to sell a letter I send to you. Knowing you as I do, I don’t believe this is a great risk, but if it is—if it is a mistake, Meg, it is a mistake I won’t regret making. It is a mistake for which I would deserve the consequences, and if this letter shows up on some website tomorrow, or the next day, or any day after that, I hope you know I would not blame you.
Whatever it is that I deserve, what is more important is that you deserve to know about the many mistakes I have made over these last several months. As I am sure Agent Tirmizi will mention to you, I have been quite isolated since Friday, and while I have spent a great deal of my time answering and re-answering questions, I have also had a great deal of time to think about those mistakes. I enumerate them. I work them out like equations. I work backward through each step. I try to see all the places I went wrong.
I suppose the first and worst one is that I came to the shop this spring to see you, which has, to my profound regret, exposed you to this scandal in ways that, as I hope this letter will make clear, I was foolishly, selfishly unprepared for. That evening, I knew, from the second I walked through the door of the shop, that I would be withholding something from you, because I knew I could not tell you the full story of what I had seen in your letters. Everything I have told you about Avery and me was true: I did disappoint her. I was quiet and overly reserved, sometimes too blunt, and as a guest at the many social commitments that were important to her, I never could quite master the kind of social interaction that she needed in a partner. As I told you that day in the park, we each had our reasons for attempting the relationship, and we each had our reasons for knowing it wasn’t working. The letters in your program confirmed what I always knew.
But they did something else, too. This is what I could not say, and still will not be able to say fully, not for some time. What I can tell you is that in the months prior to the wedding, something had been on my mind at work, something involving the group within the company that worked on investment securities. I could not understand the returns this group was producing so consistently. I could not understand how the math worked, though I did not expect to find anything untoward. Initially, I think I might have been looking for some kind of game to play, something that could connect me to the math I grew up loving so much. As you may have gathered, I have not felt connected to that in a long time. So here was a problem in front of me, and I could only find the solution by trying, again and again, to work backward—to reverse engineer the numbers. At first it was challenging, the most challenging math I had done in ages, and I enjoyed working on it.
