be a lot of trouble. “You gotta take care of yourself though. You look like you been sick. You gotta eat right and get healthy.” She bustled down the stairs then, and promised to come back later with some towels, and Gabriella said she'd stop in to pick them up herself to spare her the stairs and the trouble. Mrs. Boslicki waved as she disappeared, still clutching Gabriella's money.
Gabriella walked into the small room again, and looked around. She sat on the uncomfortable chair, and wondered if there was anything she could do to cheer the place up. She could buy a few things when she made some money, but not for the moment. A new bedspread, some prints on the wall, some fresh flowers would work wonders.
With a small sigh, Gabriella set her small suitcase down in the closet, and hung up her other dress. There was something else in her valise, her journal to Joe, which she left in the suitcase without looking at it. And it made her sadder now to realize that he had never seen it. She took it out, finally, unable to resist it, and sat down on the bed and opened the little book. It was filled with her notes about their meetings, and her love for him. It was brimming with all the excitement of first love, and the exquisite terror of their first clandestine meetings… and then further on, the passion she had found in his arms in the apartment. It was all there, right up to the end, talking about the life they would share, and at the very end it talked about the hopes that she had for their baby. And as she read the last entry, a letter fell out on the bed next to her, and she realized that she had never seen it. The envelope said “Sister Bernadette” in an unfamiliar hand, and then she realized with a start it was Joes writing, and she trembled as she opened it. It took a minute to understand what it was. It was his suicide note, the last thing he had written to her before he died by his own hand. Father O'Brian had left it with Mother Gregoria and she had slipped it quietly into the journal before she gave it to Gabbie. But Mother Gregoria hadn't warned Gabriella that it was there, and she touched it now with tears in her eyes as she read it. It was so strange that he had touched this paper only days before, that he had held it in his hand, that it was the only thing she had left of him. Just these words, carefully written on two sheets of white paper.
“Gabbie,” he began, the “Sister Bernadette” on the envelope had only been so that the letter would find her, and ultimately expose all their secrets. Without that, they might never have known, and she might still be at St. Matthew's. But that was done now, and there was nothing left to do but live with it. She couldn't go back now.
“I don't know what to say, or where to begin. You are so much better and more wonderful, and stronger than I am. All my life I have known how weak I am, what my failings are, how many people I have disappointed… my parents when Jimmy died, because I could not save him.” No matter that his brother had been two years older and far stronger, it was the younger brother who blamed himself for the heroic miracle he had been unable to accomplish, and perhaps they had silently blamed him, and if they had, she hated them for it. “I have disappointed everyone, people who knew me and loved me and counted on me. It is, ultimately, why I came to the priesthood. If I had not been such a disappointment to them.” He was talking about his parents again, and knowing him as she did, she understood that. Reading the letter was like listening to him, and it tore her at the heart now. She wanted to tell him how wrong he was, to convince him to stay… If only she had been there that night… if he had told her what he was thinking when she last saw him…
“Maybe if I hadn't been such a disappointment to them,” he went on, “or made a difference in their lives, my mother wouldn't have done what she did when my father died. She would have known