It was a real laugh, not polite, not social, but the kind that comes up from somewhere deep without permission. And something about the sound of it seemed to shift something in the room, ease some of the tension that had been sitting between them since she knocked on the door. Clare laughed too briefly, and then her face settled back into something quieter. He said something tonight, she said. He asked me why I haven't gone through David's things yet.
The last box, the one I brought from the house in Greensboro. Marcus waited. There's a letter in it, she said. David wrote it. I don't know exactly when he gave it to his lawyer to hold with instructions to give it to me 6 months after he was gone.
She paused. That was 3 and 1/2 years ago. You haven't opened it. No, he didn't ask why. He could feel the Y from across the table.
She said it anyway. I've thought about it a hundred times. I've picked up the envelope and put it back down. She was looking at the tea, not at him. What if it's something I can't unknow?
What if it changes how I remember him? What if it she stopped? What if he's telling me something I don't want to hear? Or Marcus said, "What if he's telling you something you need to hear? " She looked up. People who write letters like that, Marcus said, "Usually write them because they're trying to do something for the person left behind.
Not to themselves. " She was quiet for a long moment. "How do you know? " she asked. Marcus looked down at his own mug. Because I wrote one, he said quietly. After my wife was diagnosed.
I wrote one for Darius in case. He paused. In case it went wrong, which it did. The kitchen was very still. It wasn't for me, Marcus said.
It was for him. Everything I wanted him to know. Everything I was afraid I wouldn't get the chance to say. He looked up at her. Whatever David put in that letter, he wasn't thinking about himself when he wrote it.
Clare held his gaze. And for the first time since he'd known her, she looked not strong, not composed, not carefully held together, but real, fully, entirely real, like someone who had been holding their breath for 4 years and was finally considering the possibility of exhaling. I think she started. You don't have to, he said. I think I want to open it, she said.
A pause. "But not tonight," she added. "Not yet. That's okay," Marcus said. She nodded.