The letter is wet with my tears by the time I can see clearly again. I read it again, and again—grief and love and rage and forgiveness all tangled into a knot I can't untie.
She loved me. She always loved me.
She was afraid. She made choices I might not have made, but she made them out of fear, not indifference. She spent thirty years carrying the weight of my absence.
And my mother—
I can't think about my mother right now. That's a wound too raw to touch.
Instead, I think about what Marguerite asked. Choose love. As if it were simple. As if love weren't the most terrifying thing in the world.
But maybe that's the point. Maybe love is supposed to be terrifying. Maybe the choosing is what makes it matter.
I fold the letter carefully and slide it back into its envelope.
Then I sit a while longer, because I don't trust my legs yet.
When I finally stand, the house has gone dim around me. The whole afternoon is gone.
I wipe my face with the heel of my hand.
Then I go to find her.
22
CAT
I don't open it right away.
I sit on the edge of my bed with the envelope in my lap and look at my name in her handwriting.Catherine.Nobody called me that but her, and only when I was in trouble.
In the first years after Mum took me away, I used to check the post. Actually check it, like an idiot, like a child in a film. Nothing ever came. Eventually I stopped.
Turns out something was always coming. It just took twenty-four years and her death to arrive.
I open it.
My petit chat—
If you are reading this, you are back in my house and I am not.
I will not be clever. I have begun this letter a hundred times and burned it a hundred times, and there is no clever way in.
So: you were never a guest here. Not the extra one. Not the child who came with her mother. Not someone I kept out of charity.You were mine from the first night you fell asleep on my chest in that kitchen, and nothing that happened after changed it, and nothing ever will.
You have spent twenty-four years believing you did something wrong. You did nothing. The women who should have loved you best failed you — your mother, and me, and my own daughter, who did the very same terrible thing to her own child. Cowards, all of us, in our particular ways.
I am enclosing her letter. She left it on the table the morning she took you.
It is hers, not mine, and it belongs to you now. It will hurt. Read it anyway — and then stop asking what was wrong with you, because the answer is in her handwriting, and it was never you.
You are not hard to love, my petit chat. You were the easiest thing I ever did.
So cook in my kitchen. Sleep in my house. And stop leaving before people can leave you.
Take your chance. I took mine the day you arrived.
Your Grand-mère
