The Other Letter

The Other Letter

She read it at her desk with the door closed.

It was three pages. The handwriting was cramped and shaky in a way that suggested effort rather than age, and she recognized it before she read the first line, because she had seen it on operational documents for two years.

Yara,

I have been given between four and seven months. Something in the lungs that they found late. I am not writing to ask you for anything and I want that established in the first paragraph so you can decide whether to keep reading.

She kept reading.

I have spent almost three years trying to work out what I would say to you if I ever had the opportunity, and every version I constructed was a version where I came out better than I deserve. I am too tired now to construct anything. So this is the plain account.

I was jealous of you. That is the whole of it. Not of your position or your capability. Of the fact that Rafael changed for you.

I was with him for thirty years. I was there when his mother died and I was there when he killed his father and I was there for every night in between when he did not sleep. I built my entire life around being the person he relied on. And then a florist walked into that house and within eighteen months he was a different man; softer in the ways that mattered, harder in the ways that counted, alive in a way I had never once managed to make him.

I told myself I was protecting the family from you. I was not. I was furious that thirty years of loyalty had produced less change in him than one year of you.

That is not an excuse. Jealousy is a small, ordinary thing and I let it burn down a house.

Yara put the page down for a moment.

She thought about Marco in the kitchen of the safe house in New Jersey, waiting for her, saying I am tired. About how she had cuffed him instead of shooting him because living with it seemed worse. About how she had thought of that as mercy at the time.

She picked the page back up.

I have been cooperating with the prosecutors for three years and I will continue until I cannot. That is not penance. It is the only useful thing I have left and I would rather spend it than take it with me.

I am not asking to see you. I am not asking for forgiveness and I would not know what to do with it if you offered. You made a decision about me in that kitchen and it was the correct one and I have had three years to understand exactly how correct.

There are two things I want to say and then I am finished.

The first is that your daughter is going to grow up in a house that I helped try to destroy, and she will never know my name, and that is the right outcome and it is also the thing I think about most.

The second is about Rafael.

He will not visit me. I have not asked him to and he has not offered and both of those are correct. But when this is over... when I am gone and it stops being complicated, he is going to feel something he does not have a word for, and he is going to handle it by working. That is what he does. You know this better than I do now.

Do not let him do it alone. He did it alone when Sofia died. He was twelve and there was nobody and he built the rest of his life out of that.

That is all. Thank you for reading it.

Marco

She sat with it for a long time.

Then she found Rafael in the office, and she did not summarize it or manage it or decide which parts he should hear. She put all three pages in front of him and sat down across the desk and let him read.

It took him a while.

When he finished he set the last page down and did not say anything for perhaps a full minute.

"Four to seven months," he said finally.

"Yes."

"He did not ask for anything."

"No," Yara said. "He was very deliberate about that."

Rafael looked at the pages.

"Thirty years," he said.

"I know."

"He was at my mother's funeral. He stood next to me." Rafael's voice was completely level, which was how she knew it was not. "I was twelve and I did not have anyone and he stood next to me for the entire thing and did not say a word, because there was nothing to say, and it was the single most useful thing anyone did for me that year."

Yara did not speak.

"And then he burned my house down," Rafael said.

"Yes."

"Both of those are true."

"Yes," she said. "They are."

Rafael pushed back from the desk and stood and walked to the window, and stood there with his back to her, and Yara let him.

"I do not know what I am supposed to do with this," he said.

"You are not supposed to do anything with it," Yara said. "It is not a request. He said so twice."

"Then why send it."

"Because he is dying," Yara said, "and he wanted the record to be accurate before he goes. That is all it is."

Rafael was quiet for a long moment.

"I want to see him," he said.

Yara looked up.

"I do not know why," Rafael said, still facing the window. "I do not have a plan for it. I do not know what I would say." He turned around. "But I know that if I do not, I will spend the next forty years knowing I had four months and did nothing with them, and I have already done that once with my mother."

Yara stood.

"Then we go," she said.

"You would come?"

"Obviously," she said.

Rafael's phone buzzed on the desk between them.

He picked it up, read it, and his face changed.

"What," Yara said.

"It is the facility," Rafael said slowly. "Marco was moved to a hospital ward this morning. Before the letter even reached us."