The foundation asked for Richard's resignation on a Tuesday, in a letter delivered by courier. Eleanor learned about it from the newspaper. The photograph showed him leaving the foundation's offices on Clarendon Street, his coat collar turned up. He looked smaller than she remembered. She folded the paper and put it in the recycling, and made her tea.
The divorce papers arrived in November. Her lawyer — Priya Shah, recommended by Marcus — walked her through the terms in an office with a view of the Common. It would be uncontested. Eleanor signed where Priya pointed, and felt nothing except a distant surprise at how little she felt.
"I can ask for more," Priya said. "Given the circumstances."
"I don't want more," Eleanor said. "I want it finished."
They sold the townhouse in December. Eleanor did not go to the closing.
On the day the sale was finalized, she walked past the townhouse on her way to the market. She didn't plan it; her feet took her there. The new owners had already put a wreath on the door. It was a handsome wreath. She stood across the street and looked at the windows — her windows, not hers anymore — and waited to feel something. What came was quieter: relief, plain and unadorned. She had lived in that house for thirty-one years and mourned in it for twenty-three. She was done with both.
She walked on to the market and bought clementines, and ate one on the way home, and laughed at herself in the cold air.
* * *
The letter came in January, in Richard's slanted, careful script. She opened it at the kitchen table, with her coffee going cold beside her.
Eleanor,
My lawyer tells me I shouldn't write this. I am writing it anyway. There are things that belong in a letter and not in a courtroom, and I have run out of rooms.
I am not going to ask you to forgive me. I know better than that, or I have learned better, which is not the same thing and comes too late to matter. What I owe you is an account. Not an excuse. I know the difference.
When Claire Donovan came to me in the spring of 2004, I did not believe her at first. Then she showed me the photograph she had taken — the baby, the mark on her wrist — and I believed her, and I made a choice in the space of an afternoon. I told myself the child was alive and well, that digging up the fire would destroy lives to no purpose, that the foundation did too much good to be sacrificed to my private grief. All of that was true. None of it was the reason.
The reason was simpler and uglier. I was afraid. Afraid of what people would say, of what it would do to the name, to the money, to everything I had built my life on. I chose the edifice over the child. I have told myself a hundred versions of why, and they all come down to that one sentence, and I am tired of the versions.
The payments were the worst of it, I think. Not the decision — the maintenance. Every month, a reminder that I knew. I told myself I was protecting her, the girl, keeping Claire quiet so no one would come looking and unsettle her life. That was partly true. It was also convenient. It let me feel like a guardian instead of what I was.
You asked me once, years ago, why I never cried about Grace. Do you remember? It was at the lake house, the summer she would have turned ten. I said I had to be strong for both of us. The truth is I couldn't afford to cry. If I had started, I don't think I would have been able to stop, and then everything would have come out, and I had decided — I had decided — that it wouldn't.
I am not asking anything of you. I know the divorce is final and I know why. I only wanted you to have this, the true account, from my hand, since so much of what you had from my hand was false.
I hope the girl is well. I hope you are well. I hope that is not too much to hope.
Richard
Eleanor read it twice. Then she folded it and set it on the table, and sat there until the light changed.
She did not forgive him. The letter asked for nothing, and she gave it what it asked for: she read it. She let it be true. And then she felt the weight of him lift — not all at once, but the way snow leaves a branch, a little at a time, until one morning the branch is bare and you can't say exactly when it happened.
Hate had been a structure in her life for months. She had not noticed how much room it took up until it started to empty.
She did not write back. There was nothing to say that the letter hadn't already said to itself. But she kept it, in the drawer with the locket's box, because it was true, and she had lived too long among things that weren't.
That evening she called Emily. They talked for twenty minutes about nothing in particular. Before they hung up, Emily said, "You sound different."
"Lighter," Emily said. "Like you put something down."
Eleanor looked out her small kitchen window at the street below, where the bakery's lights were just coming on. "I think I did," she said.
After they hung up, she sat for a while in the quiet apartment. Two rooms above a bakery. Her books, her mother's desk, the harbor painting on the wall. It was not much, measured against what she had left. It was everything, measured against what she had carried.
For the first time in twenty-three years, she felt unburdened. Not healed — she did not believe in that word, not yet. But unburdened. The difference, she thought, was that healing was something that happened to you, and this was something she had done.
She made tea. She opened her book. The evening came on, ordinary and entire, and it was enough.
Chapter 20: The Locket, Closed