himself upright, a new, deeper tension moving over his features. “There’s a bit more.”
“More?”
Macon reaches into his pocket and pulls out a small bundle of folded papers. “I could tell you all this. But it’s the past that’s haunting us now, so I think it’s better if you hear it from the me that you used to know. It isn’t exactly pretty, and some of it I am ashamed of, but these, too, are yours.”
He sets the bundle on the table before me. “Read them. If you want to end this afterward, it will hurt badly. But I won’t stop you. We’ve played enough games over the years. I don’t want what’s between us to be another one.”
Gray edges my vision, and I expel a hard breath. I want to tell him that it will never be over for me, but he doesn’t wait for my answer, doesn’t even meet my eyes; he simply nods toward the papers. “Go on. I have nothing left to hide.”
With another breath, I unfold the pages. The letters are all clearly written on whatever paper must have been on hand: stationery, spiral notebooks, a rumpled scrap. The ink is different on each one: some in black, some in blue. One is scrawled in smudged pencil lead. The top letter is the oldest, dated a few months after my family moved to Los Angeles, the black ink scrawled so hard there are small punctures where the pen pushed through the paper.
D—
My mother is dead. The doctors say it was an aneurism. Personally, I think she simply did not want to be here any longer. I empathize.
I can’t cry. I keep trying but nothing happens. There is just this fucking heaviness, a thick black ball in my throat. But no tears. You never cried. No matter how badly we argued, I never saw you shed a tear. Neither have I. Which makes me wonder why it is that we can’t cry. Are we some kind of broken? Or do you cry when no one is looking? These are things I find myself wondering at odd times. You know, in those moments between trying to cry so that I can grieve. I do grieve, but not in the way I expected.
Point of fact—and I’ll only confess this to you, who will never receive this letter—I am happy too.
She left everything to me. The house, the money, everything.
It isn’t the money that makes me happy. It’s the freedom.
Freedom, Delilah. That’s what she’s given me.
I know you think I always had money. I had nothing. It was all hers. Her family money. A small allowance is all I got. He—my father—wouldn’t allow me to work. No Saint would be seen laboring for money. Which is a load of bullshit since he came from nothing, he just didn’t want anyone to know it.
That necklace I sent—the one you want no part of—was the sum of all my savings. Years of squirreling away my funds. My ticket out of here. I wanted you to have it: a penance for all my misdeeds. Melodramatic on my part, don’t you think?
Doesn’t matter now. You don’t want it. And I have more money than I need. Obscene amounts.
The money allows me to breathe free.
For the first time, I can breathe.
And it’s all because my mom is dead.
My happiness is a twisted thing.
Are we all so fucked up, Delilah? Or is it just me?
Whatever the case, I’m getting out of here. Packing up and going to Berkeley—not my father’s alma mater, Alabama, as he demanded. Because, fuck him.
Anyway, the funeral is tomorrow. If you were here, would you hold my hand? I’m guessing no. But I wonder, if I held yours would you let go or would politeness keep your hand in mine. I wish I could find out.
—Macon
“I would have held your hand,” I whisper, my hands shaking. “If I had been there, I would have done it.”
But Macon is gone. At some point, he left the kitchen. I hurt for him, for the pain and confusion that is so clear on the page. I want to cry for him. But he’s right; I never can truly manage it. I had no idea he couldn’t either.
It’s his voice in my head now, telling me to keep reading. I pick up the next letter.
Delilah,
I graduated today. Magna cum laude in classic literature—a degree my father would have hated. Not that he was here to tell me. There was no one here to see me graduate.