I made tea because I did not know what else to do with my hands. He sat at my small kitchen table and set the briefcase across his knees and looked at me for a long moment with an expression I could not read, something between sorrow and apology and a strange, aching tenderness.
“Carl instructed me very precisely,” he said. “I was not to come to you until three days after he was buried. Not a day sooner. He was quite insistent about it. He wanted you to have time to grieve him as the man you knew before you learned who he really was.”
My stomach turned over. “What do you mean, who he really was?”
The lawyer opened the briefcase and withdrew a single envelope, thick and cream-colored, my name written across the front in a careful hand I recognized from the Scrabble notebook. He held it out to me.
“He wrote this for you,” the lawyer said. “He made me promise it would reach you unopened, and only today. I think it will explain everything. I am sorry. I have known about this for a very long time, and I have carried it, and it has not been easy.”
My hands were shaking as I took it. I broke the seal and unfolded the pages, and I began to read.
My dearest, the letter began, and then, in Carl’s careful hand:
Our meeting was not an accident. I have known you your entire life, and I have watched over you quietly from a distance for all of it.
The room tilted. I felt the strength leave my legs and I sank slowly to the floor, the pages clutched in my fist, my heart hammering against my ribs. The lawyer half rose from his chair but I waved him back. I needed to read the rest. I needed to know.
