There's a second sheet behind it. Older. Yellowed, folded soft at the creases from being opened and refolded a hundred times.
I know the handwriting before I've read a word of it. Cramped, slanting, always in a hurry. I have shopping lists in that hand. Birthday cards. A note on a fridge that saidback late, don't wait up, over and over, for years.
Marguerite—
By the time you find this, I'll be gone. I can't stay here anymore. I can't watch you with her, can't pretend that what I feel doesn't exist, can't keep lying to myself about what's possible.
I love you. I've loved you for twelve years, since the day you took me in, since the day you gave me a home when no one else would. I know you don't feel the same. I know you love Hélène, and I know that will never change. But knowing it and accepting it are two different things, and I can't do the second one anymore.
I tried. God, I tried. I tried to be grateful for what you gave me — the friendship, the family, the place to raise my daughter. I tried to love you the way you loved me. But my heart wouldn't cooperate. It kept wanting more.
Cat doesn't understand. She keeps asking why we're leaving, why we can't stay for the summer, why I'm crying. I don't know how to explain it to her. How do you tell a twelve-year-old that her mother is leaving paradise because she's in love with someone who doesn't love her back?
I know I'm hurting her. I know she loves this place, loves you, loves the life we've built here. And I know that by taking her away, I'm stealing something precious from her. But I cannot — physically cannot — stay here and watch you be happy with someone else. I'm not strong enough.
Please forgive me. Please, someday, explain to Cat that this wasn't her fault. It was never about her. She is the best thing that ever happened to me, and I'm going to spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to her.
I hope you and Hélène are happy. I mean that. Even though every word feels like a knife — I hope you're happy. You deserve to be.
I just wish I could have been the one to make you that way.
Goodbye, Marguerite. I'm sorry I couldn't be what you needed.
—Vivian
She never made it up to me.
That's the first thing I think, and it's a small, ugly, unworthy thought, and I let myself have it anyway. She said she'd spend the rest of her life making it up to me, and then she spent it in a series of flats in South London with the curtains shut, and she died at fifty-four without ever once telling me the truth.
The second thing I think takes longer to arrive.
It wasn't me.
I have built an entire person out of the belief that it was me. That there is some flaw in me — something not quite right, not quite enough, not the kind of thing people stay for. I have arranged twenty-four years around that flaw. I left jobs before they could let me go. I left people before they could get bored. I told myself it was independence and it was cowardice, and I learned it at twelve years old in the back of a car, watching this house get smaller.
And it wasn't me. It was never me.
I make a sound I don't recognise.
I don't know how long I sit there. Long enough that the light goes orange and then grey. Long enough that the paper goes softin my hands. I'm shaking and I can't stop and I don't especially want to.
The door opens. I don't hear it. I just feel the mattress dip, and then Iris is there, and she doesn't say anything at all — noare you okay,nowhat did it say,no fixing, no plan — she just takes the letters out of my hands and sets them aside and puts her arms around me.
And I break.
I cry the way I haven't since I was a child in this house — badly, loudly, with my whole body — and Iris holds on and doesn't flinch and doesn't let go.
"She loved her," I get out, eventually. "My mother was in love with her. That's all it ever was. That's the whole thing."
"I know." Iris's hand moves in slow circles on my back. "I read mine. She told me some of it."
"Twenty-four years." My voice cracks in half. "Twenty-four years I thought I wasn't—"
"I know."
She doesn't tell me I'm enough. She doesn't tell me it wasn't my fault, or that I'm loved, or any of the things I would have batted away like a cat with a moth. She just holds me while I fall apart, and lets it be as bad as it is, and stays.
Which turns out to be the only thing that could have reached me.
