After dropping Tilly at school, Edward returns immediately to the letter. He’d left it propped up on the kitchen counter by the kettle but has been thinking of nothing else since – as if he’d left pieces of his skin behind on the pages and needed to return to reattach them to himself. When he’s at last sitting with the letter in his hands again, Edward feels a deep sense of relief he can’t explain.

For months after Greer died, he’d felt that sense of loss all the time: every second of every minute of every day. He’d be walking along the hallway and stop and turn around, trying to recall what he’d forgotten. Then he’d remember: his wife. The idea that she’d gone in any sort of absolute and permanent way wasn’t something he could make sense of – neither his mind nor his body could comprehend it – he felt instead that she’d wandered off somewhere and neglected to tell him where she’d gone while, at the same time, taking a part of him with her. Eventually, Edward had managed to overcome this extremely disturbing phenomenon by shutting down every feeling part of himself, so there was nothing to miss any more, whether he’d ever had it or not.

Now he slowly unfolds the letter, half expecting the words to have evaporated in his absence. It’s not addressed to him by name, simply beginning with a sentence at the top of the page, but there’s absolutely no doubt in his mind that it’s intended for him.

Monday 1st May ’17

 

I know that you have given up hope of ever feeling happy again. I know you’re just shuffling through your days now, trying not to make any major mistakes, waiting until it’s all over, until everything is at an end. And, should you want to pass the rest of your life like this, you won’t be judged for it. And yet, there is a tiny part of you that still flickers brighter than the rest, a dim spark of hope that lingers on. I know you feel it flare up sometimes: when you step into an unexpected patch of sunlight, when your daughter laughs, when you chance upon a deer who’s wandered into your garden and, instead of skittering away, he stops and looks you right in the eye.

I know you’ve suffered great tragedy twice in your lifetime, twice more than any man should have to suffer and I know that, even then, you still experience little moments of glory and wonder – hidden bubbles that burst up unexpectedly amid the madness and misery. I know, too, that occasionally – usually at twilight, when the veil between the magic and the mundane is nearly lifted – you see that a choice is open to you, and that the life you choose is up to you.

Edward folds the letter on his lap twice in half, smoothing the edges across his knees. He knows he’ll open it up many times again, that he will reread and reread, but for now he needs a little silence. He needs to make sense of this mystery, to figure out who sent him the letter and why. It must be someone he knows, since the writer clearly understands him so well, better in fact than he understands himself. Which is rather strange and, in fact, slightly scary. Has someone been watching him, following him, spying on him? But even then, how could they see so deep into his heart? Perhaps it’s from his sister, Alba. Yet it doesn’t read as if it’s written by a sister, being both too impersonal and yet too intimate all at once.

Edward takes a deep breath. He already feels different, despite himself. In the past three hours, since he first read the letter, his cells have started to shift about, his blood has begun pumping a little faster, his bones are realigning, minute cracks are creeping across the ice encasing his numb heart.

Edward puts his hand to his chest, feeling an ache in his muscles and bones, as he sometimes does when he stands after kneeling on the floor for too long. He wonders, for a moment, whether he might be about to have a heart attack. So he sits, waiting for the pain to pass, glancing about the kitchen, wondering what his wife would have thought of the state of this house. He asks this of himself often, though he knows the answer: she would have hated it. She would have thought it boring and bland, the opposite of the magnificent multicoloured costumes she created which, Edward reminds himself, was exactly the point. A few months after she’d died he’d suddenly decided that he had to find a new place to live, a place that didn’t remind him of her every single second of every single hour of every single day. It was a decision he’s regretted in a million moments since.

Edward stares at the oven. And then, for some reason, after studying a rogue spot of strawberry jam on the marble worktop, Edward glances up at the ceiling, at the thick black crack snaking across the plaster. He feels a sharp tug in his chest and presses his hand closer to his heart. And then, for the first time in a very long time – almost three years, in fact – Edward feels the urge to do something, something useful, something ordinary and insignificant.

Edward stands. He will mend the crack in the ceiling.

 

Clara sits with a box of papers in her lap. Her mother chatters away in the background, something about swing dancing and high heels, while Clara presses her fingers to the first page, the heat of her skin making marks on the black leather. She’s torn between a desperate desire to read and devour every word and a longing to save the pages forever untouched, so keeping a little piece of her grandfather always alive and unwrapped.

Clara has never been a particularly curious person. She’s never kept awake at night wondering what’s happened to all those people who receive her letters. She doesn’t want to ask her customers what they write in their own letters. She’s never tempted to open the ones she’s promised not to read. Once, when Clara was thirteen, she had a deep crush on a boy and, while they sat in his bedroom listening to records, he left to go to the bathroom. She shifted to lean against the wall and felt something hard under the duvet. It was his diary. She hadn’t read it. Perhaps, Clara sometimes thinks, this lack of curiosity accounts for her lack of success as a writer of fiction. And yet, she knows now that, no matter how much she longs to hold on, no matter how greatly she wants this moment to last for ever, she will, of course, read this diary.

Every inch of the first page is enveloped with her grandfather’s handwriting, a small, slanting script in twilight-blue ink from the nib of his favourite pen. She can imagine him, hunched over the writing desk in the shop, scribbling away. He only ever wrote with one pen, the very first he ever made, when he was an apprentice in Amsterdam, before his family came to England. And he’d never allowed her to write with it, no matter how much she’d begged.

‘A perfect pen falls in love with a single hand,’ he had said. ‘Its love is lifelong and loyal. In the hand of another it will dry up, it will scratch out words and turn everything into an illegible mess. It isn’t fair to put it through that pain. So you may hold my pen, my sweet, but I’m afraid I can never allow you to write with it.’

A sigh of sorrow rises in Clara’s chest but she swallows it down, knowing it’d arouse comment from her mother. Her grandfather’s twilight words blur. Clara blinks and brushes her fingers over her eyes. Then she takes a deep breath and begins to read:

‘Dad! What on earth are you doing?’

Edward looks down from where he’s standing on the tabletop. He brushes plaster out of his eyes, then wipes long dusty white streaks across his jeans.

‘I’m mending the crack in the ceiling,’ he says.

Tilly raises an eyebrow. ‘It looks like you’re making a massive hole in the ceiling.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Edward says. ‘It’s all part of the process.’

The arch of Tilly’s eyebrow rises higher. ‘Ok-ay.’ Dropping her school bag on the floor (then shifting it a safer distance from underneath the large hole) Tilly walks over to the cupboards and starts searching for biscuits.

‘Pass me that hammer,’ Edward says, ‘and stop doubting your father’s skills. I am an architect, you know.’

Tilly sticks her head out of the cupboards and picks up the hammer with her free hand, the other clutching a packet of dry digestives. ‘Dad, you haven’t done that for years.’

Edward takes the hammer and taps at the jagged edge of the hole. A little shower of white powder dusts his hair. ‘I know. But, I’m thinking maybe it’s time for me to start working again.’

Tilly, with half a biscuit sticking out of her mouth, looks up.

‘But you sold the firm.’

Edward shrugs. ‘That doesn’t mean I can’t get a job working for someone else’s firm, or doing freelance jobs,’ he says, still gazing up into the hole. ‘Anyway, it’s just a thought I had today. I haven’t made any plans, I was just thinking.’

‘That’s great, Dad,’ Tilly says, swallowing the biscuit, then nibbling at another. ‘You should get a job. It’ll do you good to do less thinking and more actual living.’

Edward pulls his attention away from the hole to regard his daughter. How can you be so wise, he wants to ask, did you grow up while I wasn’t looking? But the realisation of just how much he’s been neglecting Tilly since his wife died brings tears to his eyes and he has to say something else instead.

‘I’m glad to see you’re eating today. Does this mean you’ve come to your senses and no longer think you’re fat?’

‘You’re so lame, Dad.’ Tilly rolls her eyes. ‘These biscuits only have twenty-eight calories each. I can have three.’ And, with that, she leaves the kitchen.

Edward gazes after her as she skips purposefully along the corridor, and suddenly thanks every lucky star he never thought he had – quite the opposite, in fact, if there are such things as unlucky stars – that his darling daughter seems so relatively unscathed by everything. If only he was so robust himself.

As Edward’s gaze returns to the hopelessly gaping hole above his head, another thought comes to him: after fixing the mess he’s made of his ceiling, he will have to, somehow, track down whomever sent him the letter.