His Real Letter
Chapter 07 - His Real Letter
The forged letter was in a drawer beside my bed. I had kept it inside a greeting card because I couldn't bear to throw away anything that appeared to carry Daniel's handwriting. It was only half a page, written on the stationery from his office, and I had read it so often that the folds had begun to split.
Sarah, it said, I have let the business take too much from us. Jake will handle the Marigold from now on. Please don't fight him. I'm sorry for what I can't fix.
Linda had given it to me six days after the funeral. She said she'd found it in Daniel's desk. I remembered the way she touched my cheek when I cried, how kindly she told me not to blame myself. That tenderness had made the words seem more believable. A stranger's deception might have been easier to recognize.
I placed the note beside one of Daniel's old Christmas cards. The handwriting was good enough to fool someone who wanted to be fooled, but the letter g was different. Daniel closed the bottom loop of his g; on the note it hung open. The card also had a little smear of blue ink, the mark left by a man who pressed too hard whenever he was in a hurry.
I hadn't noticed because I had never believed Linda capable of standing beside me at a graveside while a lie rested in her handbag.
From the safe-deposit box I took the sealed letter Evelyn had told me to save. Daniel had addressed it in his own uneven capitals: TO SARAH, IN CASE WE DON'T GET A CHANCE TO TALK. I used the blunt end of a butter knife to lift the flap, then sat at the kitchen table where we'd once argued about whether to buy a dishwasher.
He began by apologizing for being distracted. He said he'd been ashamed that his brother's accounts were in such a mess, and more ashamed that he'd asked me to trust a family business he himself had failed to supervise. He said none of the mistakes were mine. The Marigold, he wrote, should have been a place for us to grow old, not a burden I carried while he tried to please his mother.
Then came the sentence that left me with my face in my hands.
If I have made you feel like a guest in the life we built together, it is the worst thing I've done, and I want to spend the rest of my life correcting it.
I sat there until the sky changed color. Daniel had loved me. He'd also failed me, though not in the way I'd believed. I could admit both things without betraying his memory. That was harder than simply turning him into a saint.
Near the end, he mentioned a meeting with Jake and Linda. He intended to demand the missing rent payments be returned and to have Miriam put my inheritance beyond anyone's interference. He added the name of a bank officer who had reviewed the accounts. And in the margin, in a hand hurried enough to slant, he wrote: Evelyn has the key. If anything happens, don't let them tell you there was nothing.
I read the letter once more, this time standing beside the window. Daniel had written about buying paint for the upstairs hallway, about taking Mason fishing, about teaching me how to use the terrible old table saw without frightening myself. They were foolishly modest plans. I'd spent four years imagining the final hours of his life as a retreat from me; here was a man making room for me in his future.
I found an old voicemail from him on my phone. His voice was muffled by street traffic. “Don't forget your appointment Tuesday,” he said, “and tell Mason I fixed the wheel on his wagon.” There was a little pause before he added, “Love you.” I had saved it because it was ordinary, and I played it now for the same reason. The dead do not return to correct the things we have been told about them. Sometimes the evidence they leave is no more remarkable than a repaired wheel.
At noon I brought the two letters to Miriam. She asked for the originals to be examined, then called Evelyn in. Evelyn listened while I read Daniel's letter aloud. When I reached the words about becoming a guest in our own life, she took out a tissue and held it between her fingers without using it.
“I should have come to you sooner,” she said afterward.
“You didn't know what Linda had told me.”
“I knew enough to be suspicious. There's a difference.”
Miriam asked whether Daniel had ever given Evelyn copies of financial statements. She had. A small stack, bound with a rubber band, was in her filing cabinet. Jake had dismissed her months before Daniel died, but she'd kept the records because the numbers troubled her. The rent-roll entries showed payments made by tenants that never reached the Marigold's operating account.
“About two hundred and eighty thousand over three years,” she said.
Miriam wrote the number down. “Do you know where it went?”
“Not all of it. Some transfers had Jake's initials. Some went to a management company I've never heard of.”
“J.M. Advisory?” I asked.
Evelyn looked up. “Yes. How did you know?”
I thought of Brittany's printout and the seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars paid before her wedding. Pieces that had seemed unrelated began to settle into a pattern. Jake hadn't lost control of a business by accident. He'd been using it for years to hide what he took from others.
Miriam asked for another meeting with the title insurer that afternoon. She also warned me that a court case wouldn't return the last four years of my life, even if we won every legal claim. I knew she was trying to be kind. Still, I resented the warning. I wanted someone, for one minute, to say there would be a way to make everything whole.
On the way home I stopped by Mason's school. He came out with a poster for his science project, the corners curling in the warm air. In the car he told me about a classmate who had eaten glue by mistake. Then, as we waited at a light, he asked whether Grandma was coming to his baseball game on Saturday.
“I don't know, sweetheart.”
“Is she bad?”
I held the steering wheel. Linda had baked his birthday cakes and watched him when I was sick. She had also taken his father's legacy and helped hide what happened before his death. I could not give him a neat answer, and I was beginning to think that might be the only honest kind.
“She's done some very wrong things,” I said. “It's possible to love someone and still need to keep yourself safe from them.”
He thought about this until we reached home. “I don't want her to go away forever.”
“Neither do I want you to lose everyone you love,” I said. “But I can't promise what happens next.”
May you like
There was a yellow envelope tucked beneath our doormat. No return address. Inside was a photocopy of a petition that had not yet been filed, with my name typed in capital letters beneath a heading about the welfare of a minor child.
Jake was asking a court to put Mason in Linda's care.
