"You have questions," he said.
"I have thousands. Most of them aren't for tonight." Sarah sat across from him at the dining table, in the chair that had been hers, and folded her hands the way she had at fifteen being told about money. "Tonight I only have one I can't carry back to Nova Scotia with me. You knew about the signature."
"I knew there was paperwork." He did not look away from her, and she understood that this, too, was a thing he had been practising. "I did not know the word for what Fenn did until your sister put the report in front of me. But I knew there was paperwork I hadn't watched being signed, and I knew why I hadn't watched. A man can not-know a thing very deliberately, Sarah. I was a virtuoso. The company was drowning and you were the β I had a phrase I used in my head. I called you the family's best asset. I want you to hear that I am ashamed of the phrase, not just of the fact. You were twenty-nine years old and I was doing arithmetic with you."
She absorbed that the way she had absorbed everything that weekend: standing, as it were, very still inside herself, letting it land.
"Mom found the note," she said. "In the boathouse. That night."
"She never told me what it said. Not the words. She told me only: she's gone, Robert, she's alive and she's gone, and if you love her you will let the lake have the blame. And Iβ" His hands opened on the table, empty. "I let it. I let the town drag the water for a girl I believed was alive. I stood at a memorial for my living daughter and accepted condolences, because the alternative was a scandal and a dead company and a son-in-law's family walking away. I have been confessing it in my head every night for ten years, in ascending order of accuracy. This is the first time I've managed it out loud in the right ears."
"Why are you selling the house?"
"Because I thought if I stood in it any longer I'd start lying again. It's a house that makes liars comfortable. I was going to sell it and die in a condo in Boston with a view of a different body of water, and let the lake keep everything it knew." He breathed, carefully, the way he did everything now. "Emma had other ideas. Emma has the family talent for refusing to let the record stand."
He stood then, with his practised slowness, and Sarah watched him cross the room to the sideboard β not the sideboard with the memorial programme, which Emma had quietly removed that morning without comment β but to the drawer beneath it, the one that had held table linen since before she was born. He drew out a bundle and set it on the table between them, and the whole history of her family's silence was in the way he set it down: like something that had been carried a long way by a man who no longer trusted his own hands.
It was a biscuit tin, floral, older than she was, and inside it, squared and ribboned like something in an archive, were eleven envelopes.
"Ten of them are your mother's," Robert said. "She wrote you a letter every birthday. Starting with your thirtieth, which was four months after β after the night. She kept them in the boathouse, in this tin, in the locker under the bench where you left your dress. I think she liked them to be near where she'd last β near the place. I found them after she died, when I was clearing her things, which no one in this family has ever been any good at doing in a timely fashion." His voice thinned. "The eleventh is mine. I started writing after the funeral. Hers. I never sent any of it either. I want you to understand β no. I want you to know, because understanding is yours to give or keep. I know where they were kept. I know they were kept. A father who knows there are birthday letters in a boathouse for his dead-named daughter and adds his own page to the tin instead of hiring someone to find her β that father has told you the worst true thing about himself. The rest is commentary."
Sarah put her hand flat on the tin and did not open it.
"Your mother waved," Robert said.
She looked up.
"On the footage. Emma showed me. Nine fifty-five, the dock camera. Priya's car going past the end of the drive, and your mother standing on the dock in her party shoes with her hand up. Not stopping it. Waving it on. I have watched it β Emma will tell you β perhaps forty times. I was asleep upstairs, Sarah. I was asleep in this house while my wife stood on a dock and let our daughter go, and I have never once, in three years of knowing, been angry with her for it. She got to do the one true thing any of us did that night." He leaned forward, and the illness had left so little of him that what remained seemed to be entirely purpose. "Your mother waved. I never got to. I am asking to now. Not to stop you. Never to stop you. Just β when you go back, and you will, and you should β let me be the old man on the dock this time. Let me wave you off properly, with my eyes open, knowing where you're going and that you're going there because you choose it. That's the whole of my request. I have been simplifying it for three years."
The clock ticked in the hall. Down at the water something small and ordinary splashed once and was still.
"Read the letters first," Sarah said at last. "That's where she is. If there's any waving to be done, Dad, we do it after I've heard her out." She stood, and picked up the tin with both hands, and it weighed almost nothing, and it weighed everything she had. "Tomorrow. In the boathouse. Where she kept them."
"Tomorrow," Robert said, like a man given a date he intends to live to see. "I'll be here."
Chapter 25: The Letters
She went down to the boathouse at seven in the morning with the tin under her arm and the lake holding its breath, the way it did before the wind got up. The door stuck the way it had stuck since she was twelve, shoulder and lift, and the smell came out to meet her β cedar and rope and cold iron and the faintest ghost of diesel β and she stood in the doorway of the room where she had changed out of her engagement party dress at 9:47 on a June night ten years ago, folded it over the bench, and walked out of her own life in jeans and her best friend's spare sweater.