Chapter 117: Eight Years of Nothing

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 117: Eight Years of Nothing

Mia had a box.

She brought it down from the top of her wardrobe at eleven at night and put it on the kitchen table without saying anything, and it was a shoebox, and Cole looked at it and said, "No."

"You don't know what it is."

"It's Dad."

"It's Dad," she agreed, and took the lid off.

There wasn't much.

That was the first thing. Eight years of a man and it came to: two photographs, a driver's licence that had expired in 2019, a wristwatch with a cracked face, and a folded-over stack of envelopes with a rubber band round them that had gone hard and cracked.

"Where did you get this?"

"Mum's stuff. When she died I packed everything and I didn't look at all of it." Mia sat down. "I looked at it in November."

"You've had this since November."

"Yes."

"Mia—"

"You had a mark on your neck for eighteen years and didn't mention it," she said, "so let's both take the loss and move on."

The photographs were nothing. A man in his thirties at a table. The same man holding a baby who was either of them and was probably Cole, standing in a kitchen that was not this kitchen.

Cole looked at the second one for a long time.

He didn't recognise him. That was the part that sat wrong — not grief, not anger. He looked at a photograph of his own father and got absolutely nothing, the way you look at a stranger in someone else's holiday snap.

"Do you remember him?" he said.

"I was five."

"That's not a no."

"I remember a coat," Mia said. "And that he smelled like the inside of a car. That's everything. I've tried."

The envelopes were the problem.

Nine of them. All addressed to their mother in the same hand. All postmarked between 2017 and 2018 — the year after he left, and the year after that.

All unopened.

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"She never read them," Mia said.

"No."

"Nine letters and she didn't open one of them and she kept every single one."

Cole turned the top envelope over. The flap was still down. The rubber band had left a stripe across the stack where it had been holding them for eight years.

"Do we open them?"

Mia didn't answer for a while.

"I've had them for four months," she said. "I've taken the band off twice."

They opened the earliest one at half past midnight.

It was two pages, handwritten, and it was not what either of them had braced for.

It was boring.

A man writing to his estranged wife about a job in a different city, about a flat with bad heating, about whether the car had held up, about a cousin neither Cole nor Mia had ever heard of who had had a baby in the spring. Three paragraphs about nothing. No apology. No explanation. The tone of a man continuing a conversation that had been going on a long time and had simply changed address.

And at the bottom of the second page, after Tell them I asked:

Has anything changed with C.'s neck

Neither of them said anything for about a minute.

"Read the next one," Mia said.

The next one was three months later and the same. Weather. A different job. A long complaint about a landlord.

Anything with C.'s neck?

The third:

You'd tell me. I know you'd tell me. Ask anyway.

The fourth, fifth, sixth — nothing, nothing, nothing, and then at the bottom of each, in a hand getting worse each time, the same question, phrased slightly differently, nine times across nine letters over two years.

The ninth was one page.

Elaine — I'm not going to write again after this. You've made that clear enough by not answering and I've made my peace with it, or I'm going to, which is close enough at my age.

Just the one thing. Please. If it goes dark, or if it moves, or if he starts asking about it, you don't have to write to me, you don't have to speak to me, you can put a lamp in the front window and I'll drive past and I'll see it and I'll know and I'll do what needs doing.

That's all. A lamp.

I'm sorry about the rest of it. I'm not sorry about that, because I'd do it again, and I think that's the thing you can't forgive and I've stopped asking you to.

Cole put the page down.

"He knew," Mia said. Her voice had gone thin. "He knew it was there. Before any of us. He's asking her to watch it."

"Yeah."

"And she never wrote back, and she never put a lamp in the window, and she died and put nine unopened letters in a box." Mia had both hands flat on the table. "Why wouldn't she open them?"

"Because she knew what was in them," Cole said. "And she'd already decided not to do it."

He went outside at one and stood on the fire escape in the cold without a coat, and Vesper found him ten minutes later because she'd heard the door.

He handed her the last page.

She read it twice.

"I'd do it again," she said.

"Yeah."

"Do what again?"

Cole looked at the street.

"Odile said somebody shut a door in a seven-year-old," he said. "And that they did it well enough that she'd never seen the technique in forty years."

"Cole—"

"And a man left this house the same year, and wrote nine letters asking a woman to watch my neck, and said he'd do it again and he thought that was the unforgivable part." He was very calm about it, which Vesper would mention to Dana the next day. "That's not two things."

Mia was still at the table when he came back in.

She'd put all nine letters back in order and the rubber band was on the table beside them, snapped clean through where it had finally given up.

"There's one more thing," she said.

"Okay."

"The licence." She slid it across. "It expired in 2019. He renewed it in 2014, so it's got the address he was living at when he wrote these."

Cole picked it up.

A town he'd never heard of. Ninety minutes north.

Four miles, as Dana would establish by Thursday, from the eastern perimeter of Sector Twelve.

[End of Chapter 117]