It wasn’t the last time I saw her. But I wasn’t sure I wanted to tell Kate the rest. Some memories, I have discovered, are too precious – and too painful – to share.
I told her something else. I told her about the postcard. I had gone to Ajaccio to retrieve it, the day Oliver and Kate went to the mountains, because that was where it had been left, in a deposit box at the bank there. I had been worried that to keep it in the house might prompt me, in a weaker moment, to act recklessly.
Like a coward I had not shown it to Kate at once. I had kept it for a couple of days, a vain attempt to play for time. Because I knew that, as soon as she had seen it, everything would change. I would lose her.
The postcard had come with terrible timing. Elodia was dying, then – and it was the worst part of the dying, when she was still fighting against it with all her might. Before she became resigned to it, though the latter is the worst of all, in its way.
I didn’t believe it, when it came. My first thought was that it was a hoax. Alice was dead. She had been dead for nearly thirty years.