It’s time to read this letter,Diana thinks. Shifting up onto the sofa, she leans over to the side table and turns on the lamp. The red liquid in her glass glints in the pale light. She takes a large swig of her wine—a pinotage, Tom’s favorite—and places the empty glass on the table. As the wine seeps through her body, Diana rubs her hands over her face.I can do this.
She removes the envelope from her pocket. He wrote her name as if in a rush, the letters crooked, the envelope dented with the marks of his pen. She pulls out the letter and begins to read, starting with the first line in case she misunderstood the words earlier.
Dear Diana,
If you’ve found this letter, I’m gone. I shouldn’t say “if,” as it’s clear there’s no miraculous recovery for me waiting around the corner. I am so sorry for leaving you and the kids.
I’m also sorry for something else, something I’ve never told you. I should have accepted responsibility a long time ago, before I met you. Maybe if I tell you now, it will be enough. It’s also possible I’m making things worse for you by writing this letter, but I owe it to you to tell you the kind of man I really was.
When I was 18 years old, I did something criminal. Something so terrible I can’t even write the details here.
People died. It’s all my fault.
I never owned up to what I did, a decision that was another mistake.
Others know about my past. After my death, around the time you find this letter, when I hope you’ve moved on from me, they may come into your life. Don’t let them in. Keep them away from Duncan and Phoebe.
If we had been different people, or maybe if our relationship had been different, I might have told you all this sooner. I tried, but I wasn’t sure how you’d react. Would you have been disappointed in me? Or angry? How could you trust me for lying to you for our entire relationship? For so long, I blamed you for my inability to come clean. I saw you as the obstacle to being truthful when it clearly was me. I’m sorry for so much.
Perhaps this cancer is the universe fixing my wrongs. If it is, I understand, though I wish leaving you was not the debt I had to pay.
When you speak of me to Duncan and Phoebe, tell them their father was imperfect, but he loved them, and you, more than anything.
Tom
By the third paragraph, Diana stops breathing. At the end, she finds herself lightheaded, choking for air.
I hope you’ve moved on from me.
I blamed you.
I’m sorry.
She turns over the page and examines the envelope again. This is definitely Tom’s handwriting. He wrote this letter, though the tone of it is odd, as if he anticipated the words would be dissected and analyzed.
An idea comes to her, and Diana is up, running into the kitchen, the letter clutched in her hand. She grabs the time capsule from the top of the toaster oven and dumps the contents onto the black granite countertop. She haphazardly pushes the items apart, almost ripping Phoebe’s drawing in half with her frenzied movements. Everything is there: Tom’s interview, the newspaper, the apple-picking photograph. All the other items are from 2012, when they assembled the time capsule.
Except this letter. It’s from a different time, likely right before Tom’s death in 2014.
A surge of nausea, all that wine acidic and angry, roiling in her gut, makes Diana briefly think she will vomit all over the kitchen floor. She squeezes her eyes shut and presses her fingers into her temple.
“Go back to the beginning,” she says, as if it’s that easy.
With her belly pressed against the counter, Diana recreates finding the time capsule. She sees Phoebe run in from the office with it in her hands. She remembers sitting at the table with the kids as Phoebe opened the envelope.
That’s when Diana remembers an important detail: Phoebe labored over the time capsule’s clasp, not its seal. The adhesive was untouched. It could have been possible, therefore, to add a letter ... later.
“Somelove letterthis is. What happened?” she pants. “Why doesn’t he explain what he did?”
Diana shuffles again through the time capsule’s contents, her brisk movements turning the papers and photographs into a disorienting, dizzying blur. She imagines the panic she’s feeling is similar to what it’s like to drown, or to get caught in a tornado: everything swirling around, nothing to hold on to.
Whatever Tom’s cryptic message is, she is sure of one thing: It is indeed a disaster, a man-made storm violently barreling into her life, seconds away from splintering her to pieces.
Chapter Three
Tom reaches across the warm and rumpled sheets and pulls Diana close. She draws circles on his forearm, his hair rough under her fingers. He kisses her temple, trailing his lips down to her neck and then her shoulder, where he rests his chin. She loosens her body against his and relaxes into a sort of melting contentment that happens only when he embraces her.
He murmurs; his message is indistinct. She fights her way through the layers of sleep to hear him. The words grow more insistent, and then they are clear.
