proof he could hear. “It won’t be long now,” she whispered, and as the words left her lips, she realized just how true that statement really was.
* * *
Tom didn’t flinch when Alice burst through the door before first light. No words were exchanged, explanations already given over the phone. Together they sat, Brian bringing tea and breakfast pastries that remained untouched by the time Dr. Jones arrived, along with the neurosurgeon, whose hair struck Elizabeth as too dark to be natural at his age. Funny, she thought, the observations we make when we don’t want to acknowledge the most important things right in front of our eyes.
“And the facilities?” Alice was asking when Elizabeth snapped out of her daydream. “He doesn’t like those air mattresses.” The conversation had moved in a direction Elizabeth hadn’t followed. Yet she got the gist of it; he was being discharged. “You know him here. Why can’t he just stay?”
“The thing is, Alice, there is very little more we can offer you,” Dr. Jones was saying. “Our hope was always to get him home, but despite early improvements he hasn’t responded to the medication as well as we would have liked, and the most recent changes, I’m afraid, alter the picture a little. We have to consider whether there is perhaps a more suitable environment for your father to live in.”
To die in, Elizabeth thought as she listened to the discussion. She rested her head on Tom’s chest then, feeling the rasp of his breathing, hoping that nobody saw her cry.
* * *
Later that day, during one of Brian’s trips to the cafeteria, Elizabeth knew she had to raise the idea of Kate with Alice. There was no time left to leave it any longer. “Love,” she said, “there’s something I have to tell you.” Alice rested her chin on a slender hand, her elbow propped up on the bed. “There is somebody I’d like to bring to see your father.”
“Kate,” Alice said, her face unflinching. “Your daughter.”
Elizabeth’s breath caught in her throat. “Yes. She would like to come and meet him. I’ve told her a lot about him, you see.” The tears came. It was overwhelming, all those secrets trying to find a way out. She hadn’t realized just how deep within herself she would have to dig. “I must tell you something beforehand, though. I wanted to tell your father, but now,” she said, gazing at his face, lost in a place she couldn’t reach, “I’ve left it too late.”
“You don’t need to say anything, Elizabeth,” Alice said. “He knew, he told me all about it.”
Elizabeth shook her head. “You couldn’t possibly know . . .”
“That Kate is his daughter too?” Elizabeth’s skin contracted from head to toe. How, when she had never told a soul, could Alice know? Only James had ever known the truth. “He always knew.” Elizabeth couldn’t believe it. How was it possible? “Dad told me that she looks just like me.”
Elizabeth nodded, picked up her phone, unable to speak for shock. She scrolled to the pictures and handed it over. Alice took it, staring so hard it must have been like looking in a mirror.
“He wasn’t wrong. She should be here,” Alice said, handing back the phone.
Elizabeth sobbed. Questions of how and when ran rampant through her mind, yet all she seemed to be able to grasp from those myriad ideas was a fateful cry of hopelessness. “But I left it too late.”
Alice stood up and placed her arm across Elizabeth’s shoulders, comforted by a person in such pain herself. “It’s never too late, Elizabeth. You and Dad taught me that.”
Then
Elizabeth returned to the house with Francine, cold without a lit fire and everywhere dark. Through the dim light she could see a letter on the dining room table, her name written on the front in a classic elegant scrawl. There was something ominous about the way it had been left there, ascetic against a vase of decaying flowers, foreshadowing the irrecoverable truths written inside.
“What’s that?” Francine asked as she closed the door behind them. The sea quieted as they stood still for a moment, then Francine’s footsteps echoed as she walked forward, picking it up. “It’s your father’s handwriting.”
Elizabeth took the envelope and slid her finger into the small opening to pull out the paper inside. The letters were elegant and calligraphic, the way her father wrote when he thought about it, when he took his time, when he wanted to create an impression. In that