She tries again. Nothing.
And every line of my speech goes straight out of my head — because in three months I have never once seen this woman unable to speak.
"I can't—" she manages. Stops. Presses the heel of her hand hard against one eye. "I had a whole— I've been practising it in the kitchen for an hour and it's gone. It's just gone."
"Cat."
"Read this." She holds the paper out. Her hand isn't steady. "Please. Bottom of the second page."
I take it.
It's her letter. Marguerite's letter — the one she has never shown me, the one she came out of her room holding two weeks ago with her whole face rearranged.
"Bottom of the second page," she says again.
So I read it.
I read all of it, because I can't not —you were never a guest in this house, you were mine, you were the easiest thing I ever did— and my throat closes, and Cat stands there in the middle of the room and lets me.
And then, at the bottom of the second page, in that hard upright hand:
So cook in my kitchen. Sleep in my house. And stop leaving before people can leave you.
I read it three times.
"She knew," Cat says. Her voice has gone to pieces. "She knew I'd do it. She wasdying, Iris — she had a farm to arrange and two granddaughters to gamble on and a solicitor to threaten, and she still sat down and wrote me a sentence for a night she wouldn't live to see." She laughs. It's a horrible sound. "And I've had it in a drawer. For three days. While I—"
She stops.
"While you what," I say.
"Say it."
"While Ileft." Her face folds. "I didn't say a cruel thing to you and then stay. I left. I've been gone a week. I was standing right there in our kitchen and I was already in the car."
And there it is — the thing I have been waiting seventy-one hours to hear.
It fixes nothing at all.
"You told me to go back to Chicago," I say.
"I know."
"You told me to find someone easier to love."
"I know—"
"You told me it was aphase." My voice comes out of me like something tearing. "Do you have the faintest— Cat, I have spent my entire life being told that what I want isn't real. My mother stood on our terrace and said the wordperversion,and I looked her in the face and told her no. And then I came inside and washed the wine glasses and got into bed with you." I'm on my feet without having decided to be. "And four days later you said the same thing she did. In our kitchen. In nicer words."
Cat makes a small wrecked noise.
"I know."
"Don't just—"
"Iknow, Iris." She's crying now, which she does not do. "I know exactly what I did. I took the worst thing anyone has ever said to you and I put it in my own mouth, because I wanted you gone before you could go — and itworked.And I have stood at the end of that hallway every night for three nights and not been able to make myself knock, because I knew what I'd have to look at when I did." She scrubs her sleeve across her face, roughly, like she's furious with it. "And here it is. Here you are. Looking at me like that."
The silence goes on a long time.
