2000: Vivian told me she loves me. Not as a friend, not as a daughter — as a lover. She asked me to leave Hélène for her.
I told her no. Gently, but without any room in it, because there is no room in it. I have loved Hélène for twenty years and I will love her until I die.
Vivian did not take it well.
She left this morning. Took Cat. No goodbye. Only a note saying she could not stay, could not watch, could not pretend to be glad for us.
I have lost another child. Another grandchild. The pattern repeats and I do not know how to break it.
Cat was crying when they drove away. She did not understand. She only knew she was being taken from her home, and from me, and from everything she loves. Exactly like Iris.
What is wrong with me, that everyone I love is taken away?
Cat reads it over my shoulder. She doesn't cry. She's already done that, alone, behind a closed door, with her mother's handwriting in her hands.
She just breathes out, long and slow, like someone setting down a bag she's been carrying uphill.
"There it is," she says.
"Are you all right?"
"No." She takes the notebook out of my hands, closes it, and sets it gently on the pile. "But I will be. It's not the not-knowing anymore. It's just the knowing. The knowing's heavy, but you can put it down."
We work our way to the end. Hélène's illness, the long slow leaving of her. The years after, thinner and quieter, a woman rattling around a house that had become too large.
And then the last notebook.
2019: I am dying. The doctors have not said it in so many words, but I can feel it. The tiredness that does not lift. The way my body is becoming a stranger to me.
But I have time enough for one more thing. One more chance to set it right.
I have been planning this for years. The will, the conditions, the letters — Iris and Cat brought together in this house, forced to know each other the way they should have all along.
It is manipulative. Hélène would laugh at me. But I think — I hope — it is also right.
They need each other. I can feel it, the way I felt that first lightning-strike of a thing with Hélène, all those years ago. They are both wounded. They are both alone. And if I am very lucky, they will find in each other what I found in the love of my life.
Choose love, I will tell them. It is the only advice worth giving. The only thing I know for certain.
Choose love, and hold onto it, and don't let fear make you run.
I close the journal.
Cat is watching me. Her face is blotchy and exhausted and open in a way it has never once been in the six weeks I've known her, and the last of the afternoon is coming through the windowsideways, gold on the paintings, gold on the bed, gold on the two pairs of hands in Hélène's little unframed canvas.
"She knew," I say.
"She hoped." Cat's mouth tips. "There's a difference."
"Is there?"
She doesn't answer. She reaches over and puts her hand along my jaw and wipes my face with her thumb, and I hadn't even realised I was crying.
I look around the room — the perfume bottles, the soft-spined books, the bed where two women slept for thirty-five years and were happy, in defiance of nearly everything.
"This room shouldn't be a shrine," I say.
Cat raises an eyebrow. "Meaning?"
