Chapter 6: Diane's Letter
He read it standing up.
I read it on my own phone, three feet away from him, in the same room, the way my mother had apparently intended — simultaneously, together, the two people she had spent years hoping might find each other.
The letter was four pages.
I know because the email said so.
But it didn't feel like four pages.
It felt like a door opening in a wall I hadn't known was there.
*William,*
*If you are reading this, then Eleanor found you.
Or you found her.
I always believed one of you would.*
*I need to tell you what happened.
Not to hurt you.
Not even to explain myself fully, because some things I did cannot be explained — only admitted.
But Eleanor deserves the truth.
And so do you.*
*When I left, I was afraid.
You were building something large and serious, and Victoria was already there — already part of your world in ways I was not.
She came to me.
You don't know that.
She came to my apartment, three weeks after Eleanor was born, and she told me you had decided to end things.
She showed me a letter.
She said it was from you.*
*It wasn't.*
*I didn't know that then.
I was twenty-four years old and exhausted and I believed her because the letter sounded like you — careful and kind and final.
She said you wanted to provide financially but that you felt a continued relationship would be a mistake.
She said you'd asked her to deliver the message personally because you couldn't face me.*
*I took Eleanor and I left the city.
I changed my name because I didn't want to be found.
Not by you — I thought you didn't want us.
I changed it because I was ashamed and I was heartbroken and I wanted to disappear.*
*It took me nineteen years to find out the letter was forged.*
*A mutual friend — you won't remember her, a woman named Carol Simms who worked at the building on Archer Street — she called me out of nowhere.
She'd seen something.
A conversation she'd overheard between Victoria and a man from a document service.
She'd kept quiet for years because she didn't think it was her place.
Then she got sick, and she decided it was.*
*By then, Eleanor was grown.
By then, I was ill too.*
*I didn't tell Eleanor because I didn't know how.
I didn't know if you'd want to be found.
I didn't know if she'd want to find you.
So I did the only thing I could think of — I gave her the pendant.
The one with your photo.
I told her it was someone who had loved her before she was old enough to remember.
I told her to keep it close.*
*And I filed this letter.*
*Victoria knows about Carol.
I don't know what she's done about it.
I don't know what she'll do when this letter reaches you.
But I need you to know: you have a daughter.
She is extraordinary.
She has your stubbornness and my terrible sense of direction and she deserves every good thing.*
*Please take care of her.*
*Diane*
I lowered my phone.
William was still looking at his.
His face had not changed expression exactly — but something behind it had shifted, the way light shifts when a cloud moves, not dramatic but total.
"She forged a letter," he said.
He wasn't asking me.
He was saying it out loud because saying it out loud was the only way to make it real.
"Yes," I said anyway.
He looked up.
His eyes were wet.
He didn't try to hide it.
"I never stopped looking for you," he said.
"I want you to know that.
I hired people.
Three different times.
They kept hitting dead ends because your mother had changed her name and I didn't know what she'd changed it to." His voice broke slightly on the last word.
He steadied it.
"I thought I'd failed you."
"You didn't know."
"I should have—"
"You didn't know," I said again, more firmly.
"She made sure you didn't know."
We both turned to look at Victoria.
She was standing by the window.
She had not moved since the letter arrived.
She was looking out at the dark garden below, her back to the room, her reflection faint in the glass.
"Carol Simms," William said to her reflection.
"What did you do about Carol Simms?"
Victoria said nothing.
"Victoria."
She turned around.
Her face had settled into something I hadn't seen on it before — not the smile, not the sharpness, not the careful calculation.
Just a kind of exhausted exposure.
Like a wall that has finally decided to stop holding.
"Carol moved away," she said.
"I had nothing to do with that.
She chose to move."
"Did she."
"Yes." A beat.
"She was well compensated for her choice."
The woman in the green dress — she had never left, I realized; she had been standing near the door for the past forty minutes — made a sound that was not quite a word.
William set his phone down on the table.
"Get out of my house," he said to Victoria.
"William—"
"Get out of my house.
Tonight.
I want your key and your access code and I want you gone before I come back downstairs."
Her chin lifted.
The old reflex.
"You're making a decision based on emotion.
You should wait—"
"I have been waiting," he said, "for twenty-three years.
I'm done waiting."
She looked at me one last time.
I didn't look away.
May you like
She picked up her clutch, walked to the door, and left without another word.
The room let out a breath it had been holding since Chapter One.
