Chapter 7: The Letter
The kitchen table had a wobble in its left leg. I'd discovered it when I set down the kettle my first morning here, and I'd grown fond of the way it tilted, just slightly, when I leaned my weight on the right side. Not enough to spill anything. Enough to remind me the flat was mine, flaws and all.
The tenancy agreement sat in a drawer under the toaster, signed and dated and real. The keys hung on a hook by the door, two of them now, copies I'd made for Kate in case of emergency. The boxes were unpacked. The garden outside was a square of scrubby grass and one brave rose bush that had no business blooming in October, and I loved it beyond sense.
The twins did not care about any of it. They kicked a small relentless rhythm against my ribs, like someone knocking on a door from the inside. I pressed my palm flat against my belly and waited for the pattern to repeat. It didn't. Of course it didn't. They moved when they pleased.
I had bought the paper that morning, thick and cream, the kind you reserved for thank you letters and sympathy cards. I'd told myself it was for utility bills. For the tenancy correspondence. Anyone could buy nice paper.
The first draft took me an hour, and I tore it up before I had written his name.
Dear Mycroft, I wrote. I don't know how to begin this. We haven't spoken since you ended things.
I crossed out the second sentence. I didn't want to remind him. I wanted him to remember on his own.
The second draft was shorter. Clinical even. Dear Mycroft. I am writing to inform you that I am pregnant. Twins. Identical. I have considered the matter and I believe you have a right to know.
It read like a hospital memo. I tore it up too.
The twins rolled, a long slow turn that made my breath catch. I put both hands on my belly and waited until they settled. The room was quiet. The flat was quiet. It was six in the evening and the street outside had gone soft with low autumn light, and I was alone in a way I had never quite been before, even in the worst nights in Camden.
Mycroft would be in his office now. Or wherever it was he went, those pale rooms I had only glimpsed from the edges. I knew so little about his days. Four years and he remained mostly a man of evenings, of late-night arrivals, of questions he never quite answered. I used to think that meant he trusted me with everything that mattered. I could not say what I thought now.
The third draft wrote itself. It took nine minutes.
Dear Mycroft,
I moved. New flat in Kentish Town. Two bedrooms, which tells you something I am now ready to admit: I am pregnant. Twins. Identical. A girl and another girl. I found out at twenty weeks, and I have had a great deal of time to sit with it.
I don't need anything from you. I have work, and I have Kate, and I have enough saved to manage. I am telling you because I think you deserve to know there are two of them, not because I expect you to come back.
You don't have to answer this. But if you want to know more, I will tell you. If you want to know nothing, I will accept that too.
I am well. The girls are well. That is all I wanted to say.
Jill
I read it twice. Set it down. Read it again.
The words were true. That was the problem. I had spent so long carefully arranging the truth into manageable shapes, and here it was, all of it, on one sheet of thick cream paper.
I folded it into thirds. Slipped it into the envelope. Wrote his name across the front, the address of the flat I had left behind, the one he still inhabited with all his pale furniture and his secrets.
Then I sat there with the envelope in my hands and felt the twins kick again, a small sharp jab like an objection.
The postbox was at the end of the street. I could walk there in four minutes. The last collection was at seven forty.
I put the envelope in the drawer with the tenancy agreement instead.
The drawer closed with a soft click, and I left the envelope where it lay. The truth could wait there, folded into thirds, until I was ready for it to exist outside this flat. Outside my chest.
I made tea. The kettle boiled, the cheap one I'd bought at the corner shop, and I poured it over a bag and watched it steep. My hands were steady. That surprised me. I had expected to shake, to feel the edges of everything fray, but I only stood there in my own kitchen, watching the steam rise toward the ceiling.
The twins turned again. One of them, or both, I still could not tell. I leaned back against the counter and pressed my palm against the side of my belly, and I felt it, the unmistakable pressure of a small heel or a fist, pushing back against me like a reply.
"You are too much," I whispered to them. "Too much and too loud and too early."
They kicked anyway.
The phone buzzed on the table. Kate's name, her photo, the two of us at a bar last spring with our heads tipped together. I let it ring twice before I answered.
"Did you do it?" she asked.
"No."
"Did you write it?"
"Yes."
A pause. I could hear her stirring something in her kitchen, the clink of a spoon against a bowl. "And?"
"And I folded it and put it in a drawer."
"Jill."
"I know."
"You can't just," she said, and then stopped, and I heard her exhale. "You can't just write the letter and never send it. That's not closure. That's a diary entry with extra steps."
"It's a draft."
"It's a letter. With his name on it. In an envelope."
I wanted to tell her it was more complicated than that. That the envelope in the drawer was the first real thing I had said to him since he left, even if he never read it. That writing his name across the front had felt like touching something I had been afraid to hold.
"You're doing the thing," Kate said. "The brave face thing."
"I'm making tea."
"The brave face thing with tea."
I looked out the window. The sky had gone the colour of bruised plums, and the streetlights were flickering on one by one. Somewhere out there, in a flat full of pale furniture, Mycroft was deciding what to have for dinner. He did not know about the envelope. He did not know about the girls. He did not know I could feel them turning inside me like fish in a deep pool.
"Kate," I said. "What if I send it and he doesn't answer?"
"Then you know. And you stop waiting."
"And what if he answers?"
She was quiet for a long moment. "Then you find out who he is."
The twins kicked in unison, a sharp double thump against my ribs. I put my hand flat over them, the way I did now without thinking, and I felt them settle.
"I'm not waiting," I said. "I'm just not ready to let him in yet."
"They're his girls too, Jill."
"I know."
"Do you?"
I didn't answer. I watched the last light drain out of the garden, the rose bush turning to a dark shape against the fence. I thought about the envelope in the drawer, and the address on the front, and the way it felt to write his name after four months of not saying it out loud. Mycroft. Mycroft Holmes. A name I had loved and then hated and now did not know what to do with.
"I'll send it," I said. "When I'm ready. When they're born, maybe. Or on my own time."
"That's not—"
"It's my time, Kate. That's the point."
She sighed, but I heard the smile in it. "Fine. But if you need me to post it, I will. I'll even lick the stamp."
"I love you."
"I know."
I hung up and stood there in the dark kitchen, the phone warm in my hand. The envelope was still in the drawer. The girls were still turning. The rose bush was still blooming in October, stubborn and out of season.
I opened the drawer and took the envelope out. I held it up to the window, where the streetlight caught the paper, and I saw my own handwriting there: his address, his name, a door I had chosen not to open yet.
I did not put it back in the drawer.
I took it into the bedroom and slid it into the bottom of my hospital bag, where it would sit, creased and patient, between the spare socks and the second-hand maternity books.
A letter with no date of delivery. A truth with no clock.
The girls kicked once, twice, and I lay down on the bed with my hand over them, and I let myself imagine a morning when I would be ready to open that door.