Down the corridor. Past guests who moved aside. Down the narrow servants’ stairs she could navigate in darkness.
In her room, she knelt beside the bed and pulled out a biscuit tin.
Samuel’s photograph lay on top.
Beneath it were letters tied with ordinary string.
She carried the tin upstairs.
Nobody spoke when she returned.
Elena put it on the piano and opened the first envelope.
Dear Elena,
Sam tells me you are struggling with the shift in the third movement. Slow it down until it stops frightening your hand. There is no shame in making something difficult smaller.
She opened another.
I was sorry to hear about the boy. Anyone who makes you feel foolish for loving music is saving you the trouble of discovering his other shortcomings.
And another.
Your father writes that you played beautifully on Sunday. He is impossible to speak to afterward. You would think he invented proud.
Elena’s breath broke.
For ten years, this man had been beside her.
Quietly.
At a distance she had never understood.
She looked at Gerald.
“Did he know?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“Samuel told him when you were sixteen.”
Eleanor stared at the letters.
“He knew she was alive, and he stayed there?”
“Samuel tried to arrange a challenge to the conviction. Gabriel insisted on independent protection for Elena first. Every route they tried brought them back to records controlled by my office.”
Gerald’s voice became barely audible.
“They came back to me.”
The final letter in the tin was six months old.
Elena unfolded it carefully.
Dear Elena,
I turned sixty this week. An age at which a man begins to suspect that postponing happiness is a poor investment.
There is something I have wanted to tell you for a very long time. Sam always said the right moment would come. I am beginning to think moments do not arrive ready-made. We have to be braver than that.
If you would ever consider visiting, I would like to hear you play.
She remembered reading it after a fourteen-hour shift.
She had intended to ask Samuel’s old solicitor where the institution was.
Then the boiler broke. Eleanor fell ill. Vanessa arrived to plan the wedding.
Life filled the space where the question should have been.
Elena pressed the letter against her chest.
“He asked me to come.”
Nobody offered the comfort that she could not have known.
She knew that already.
It did not help.
Maxwell approached her slowly.
“We’ll find someone who can help him. Tonight.”
Julian shook his head.
“A birth certificate and a sentimental correspondence don’t overturn a murder conviction.”
Elena looked at him.
For the first time, she was not afraid.
