"How long?" he asked.
"Years," Margaret said. "Five, at least. Maybe more. It started after Caroline left. He said you did not want to be reminded. He said it was kinder to spare you."
"Kinder," Arthur repeated. The word tasted bitter in his mouth.
"Mr. Bennett, I am not saying Daniel did anything wrong," she said. "I am only telling you what I saw. The mail came. Daniel took it. You received what he chose to bring you. I thought it was his way of helping. I thought you had asked him to do it."
"I never asked him," Arthur said. "I never told him to keep my daughter's letters from me. I never told him to decide what I was allowed to read."
"I know, sir," Margaret said. "I believe you."
"What if it was never her choice?" he asked, more to himself than to Margaret.
Margaret paused. "Then someone else made it for her," she said.
"She wrote," Arthur said. "I know she wrote. A mother who tells her seven year old son to cross two states to find his grandfather did not give up on that grandfather. She tried. Someone stopped her letters from reaching me."
Margaret stood. "What will you do, Mr. Bennett?"
"I am going to ask Daniel," Arthur said. "Tonight is too late, with Eli asleep upstairs, but first thing in the morning I am going to put the question to him directly. I am going to ask him what happened to Caroline's mail. I am going to ask him what he did with her letters. And I am going to watch his face when he answers."
Margaret nodded slowly. "He will have an answer ready," she said.
"Let him," Arthur said. "I have spent nineteen years believing a story that does not hold together. I am done believing it. Tomorrow I will ask Daniel about the mail, and I will not let him talk his way around it. If he took her letters, I want to know why."
He closed the desk drawers slowly, one by one, and closed the cabinet doors. The study looked tidy again, but it felt very different now, emptier, as if the room itself had been keeping a secret.
"Thank you for telling me, Margaret," he said. "You did the right thing."
"You would have found it out anyway," Margaret said. "You were already looking."
Arthur paused in the doorway and looked back at the desk where Caroline's letters should have been. "Yes," he said. "I was. And tomorrow, Daniel will have to answer for where they went."
Chapter 10: Daniel's Version
Arthur waited until the house had gone quiet. Eli was asleep upstairs, his fist curled tight around the ring even in sleep. Margaret had gone to the kitchen. Arthur looked at Daniel, who stood near the window with his jacket buttoned and his face arranged into the calm expression he used for board meetings.
"Come here," Arthur said. "Sit down."
Daniel did not sit. "Dad, it is late. You have had a shock. Let the lawyers handle this in the morning."
"Sit down," Arthur said again, and this time Daniel sat.
Arthur kept his voice low, mindful of Eli asleep upstairs. "I want to hear your version. Yours. What did you know about Caroline?"
Daniel spread his hands. "Nothing. I knew nothing. That is the truth."
"Nothing," Arthur repeated.
"She cut us off," Daniel said. "She left at nineteen and she never looked back. Last I heard, she was in Philadelphia, living however she wanted. She did not call. She did not write. She made it very clear she wanted nothing to do with us."
Arthur straightened his cufflinks. "Did she?"
"Yes," Daniel said. "I know tonight is emotional. But a ring does not prove anything. A child shows up at a gala with a sad story and suddenly we are rewriting history. You have to be careful."
Arthur thought of the sleeping boy upstairs. "Eli came with forty-three dollars and a bus schedule his mother marked for him. He slept in Port Authority. That sounds like a child doing what his mother told him to do."
"She told him to find me," Arthur said. "She told him, if you get to him, you can ask him yourself. A woman who wanted nothing to do with us does not send her son across two states to find me."
"You said you knew nothing," Arthur said. "You said you had not heard from her in years."
"That is right," Daniel said. "Not a word."
"Then how did you know she was in Philadelphia?"
Daniel blinked. "What?"
"You said she was in Philadelphia," Arthur said. "Eli told me she died in a hospice outside Philadelphia. You said Philadelphia before I mentioned the hospice. Or did I mishear you?"
"You must have misheard me," Daniel said quickly. "I meant, wherever she was. I did not know where she was. I assumed."
Daniel filled the silence. "Even if she was in Philadelphia, what does that prove? She left. She stayed gone. That was her choice."
"And the letters?" Arthur asked. "You said she did not write."
"She did not," Daniel said.
"Not one letter in all those years?" Arthur asked.
"Not one," Daniel said. "If she had written, you would have seen it."
Arthur felt a cold thread pull through his chest. "Would I?"