“I understand that now.”
“No, I mean—” She leaned forward in her seat. “Arthur, I spent forty years believing you chose to disappear rather than deal with me.”
He looked directly at her. “And I spent forty years believing you were already gone.”
If they had both been deceived this thoroughly, somebody hadn’t simply let two siblings drift apart. Somebody had deliberately built two separate lies and let each of them shape an entire lifetime around it.
Desmond quietly sent Piper into the kitchen to get water.
I almost wished someone would send me somewhere too.
Instead, Arthur pushed himself back up and walked, unsteadily, toward an old rolltop desk in the corner of the room.
“There’s something you need to see,” he said.
He returned holding a weathered wooden cigar box, the kind with a small brass clasp gone green with age.
He set it on the coffee table between them and lifted the lid, revealing a thick stack of envelopes bound with twine that had nearly disintegrated.
My grandmother stared at them. Every trace of color drained from her face.
“No,” she whispered.
Arthur slid one envelope across the table toward her. I could see the handwriting on the front, faded but unmistakably hers.
She picked it up with trembling fingers. “This is one of mine.”
“I know.”
“It’s still sealed. He never even opened it.”
Arthur slid another envelope beside it. “This one, I wrote you the year I turned twenty-five, asking if you’d come stay with me after your husband died. Father kept that one too.”
My grandmother stared at the words on the outside as if the sight of them had taken forty years off her all over again.
“Where did you get all of this?” she asked.
“From this house. When Father passed, I inherited everything, including boxes I never had the stomach to go through properly. They sat in the attic for years. Desmond and I only started sorting through them last month.”
Desmond spoke up quietly. “That’s where I found the photograph I asked her about. The one on your studio wall.”
The photograph that had started this entire evening.
Arthur in his thirties, arm slung around a young woman I now understood had been my grandmother, decades before I existed.
Arthur reached back into the box and pulled out another envelope. “This one is mine. One I wrote and never mailed, because Father intercepted it before I could.”
My grandmother recognized the handwriting before he even turned it around fully. “You wrote this.”
“More than once. He simply never let any of them reach you.”
My grandmother stood up so abruptly the coffee table rattled. “Why would he do that?”
Arthur flinched. “Vivienne—”
“Why, Arthur?”
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