Masked Hearts

Letter From Prison

The first letter arrived on a Tuesday, eleven months after the sentencing.

Emerald recognized the handwriting immediately, even though she had never, in all her months of knowing

Alexis Sterling, seen him write anything by hand—he'd been entirely, unreservedly a typed-communication

person, the kind who composed emails the way other people write formal briefs, precise and thoroughly

structured. The handwriting on the envelope was smaller and more careful than she would have expected, the

sort of careful that comes from relearning the weight of a pen after years of not needing it.

She held the envelope for a long time, standing at the mailboxes in the lobby of her building, before she

opened it.

Dear Emerald,

I've started this letter seven times. The versions that came before this one were longer—explanations,

justifications, things I told myself were for you but were probably really for me. I've thrown them all away.

What I want to say is this: I'm sorry. Not the way I said it in the visiting room, with a wall of glass between

us and a guard watching—though I meant it then too. I mean it the way you mean things when you've had nine

months of silence and solitude to understand exactly what you've done and why, and to face, without any of the

usual distractions, the shape of the damage.

I think about Daniel every day. The relief of knowing he's alive is—I don't have words for it. But knowing

he's alive doesn't erase what I set in motion. Those are two separate things. I'm trying to learn how to hold both

of them.

You don't owe me a response to this. You don't owe me anything. But I wanted you to know that the time in

here has done what time in a place like this is supposed to do, I think—it has made me look at things I spent

forty years finding ways not to look at. That's uncomfortable, and necessary, and I think probably good.

I hope you're well. I hope Anabel is well. Tell her, if you think it's appropriate, that I finished the book she

and I argued about at the café. I was wrong about the ending.

With all the sincerity I should have shown when I had the chance,

Alexis

Emerald read it twice, standing in the lobby, and then folded it and put it in her bag and went upstairs and

made a pot of tea she didn't particularly want. She thought about not responding. She thought about responding right away. She thought about what it

meant that her first instinct, on reading the letter, had been something that felt like a kind of sad, complicated

relief—not forgiveness, exactly, not yet, but something adjacent to it: the relief of a person who has been

waiting, without knowing they were waiting, for someone to finally say what needed saying.

She wrote back three weeks later.

Alexis,

I read your letter more than once. I wasn't sure, at first, whether I wanted to respond. I'm still not entirely

sure. But I find myself believing that you mean what you say, and I think—I know—that that matters, even when

the meaning of it can't undo what happened.

Daniel is well. Better than well, actually—he's designing again. There's a community center project in the

east end that, if it comes together the way it's taking shape on his drafting table, is going to be remarkable. He

found his way back to it. That says something about who he is.

Anabel says: she was always right about the ending, and she forgives you for needing nine months to figure

that out.

I'm not sure what I want to say about the rest of it yet. About us—about what we were, and what happened.

Those are bigger things, and I think they need more time and more distance before I understand them well

enough to put them into words. But I don't want to be the kind of person who refuses to acknowledge when

someone is genuinely trying. So: I acknowledge it. I see you trying.

Take care of yourself.

Emerald

The letters continued, after that—not frequently, not with any fixed schedule, but steadily, arriving and

being answered in the unhurried rhythm of people who have nothing to prove and nowhere to rush. They wrote

about books, because that had always been easy between them. About the community center, about changes in

the company, about small things that had nothing to do with courts or crimes or staged deaths in ravines. And

sometimes—carefully, obliquely, in the way of things that are too large to be addressed head-on—about the year

that had taken everything apart and what it meant to be rebuilding from the rubble.

Emerald didn't tell Anabel about the letters, not immediately. When she finally did—one evening, matter-

of-factly, the way she tried to handle most things that were actually complicated—Anabel received the

information with the characteristic stillness that meant she was processing.

"Good," she said finally. "I think that's good. I think—" She paused. "People should have the chance to do

better. Even when they've done something terrible. Not for the person who was hurt—that's separate—but for

their own sake. Because people who are genuinely sorry deserve the chance to become better than the person

who was sorry."

"That's a remarkably mature view," Emerald said.

"I've had a complicated year," Anabel said, with the small, dry smile that was her answer to things that were

both true and slightly more than she wanted to fully acknowledge. "Complicated years make you mature very

quickly, turns out."

* * *

The question of Alexis's identity as Anabel's father continued to live, unasked and unanswered, in the back

of Emerald's mind throughout this entire period—a low hum of something unresolved that she returned to, late

at night, in the way you return to a loose thread that you know you should either pull or tie off but keep leaving

for later.

She thought about the masquerade constantly now—not with the old wistfulness, but with the strange

precision of someone trying to fit pieces together across a gap of nearly two decades. The timing worked. The

geography worked. Alexis's laugh, which she had known for months before he went to prison and which still surfaced, sometimes, in the letters—a dry, self-deprecating humor that was entirely and recognizably his—

worked.

And then there were Anabel's eyes. Anabel's particular way of entering a room, the way Anabel listened—

full body, completely present, the kind of listening that made people feel the whole of their attention. These

things had always seemed to come from somewhere outside Emerald's family, some current of character that

had arrived from another direction. Looking at them now, through the lens of everything that had happened,

they looked different.

They looked like Alexis.

She was not ready to do anything with that knowledge yet. There were too many questions about what

doing something would mean—for Anabel, who had her own complicated feelings about Alexis and who was

only beginning, carefully, to find her footing in a world that had been rearranged significantly over the past

year; for Alexis himself, who was in prison and who had enough to be going on with in the way of reckonings

without adding the weight of fatherhood to the list; and for Emerald herself, who needed to be absolutely certain

—not ninety percent certain, not almost certain, but certain—before she opened a door that could not be closed

again once she'd opened it.

She began, quietly, to research DNA testing.

She did not tell anyone she was doing it. She did not even fully admit to herself, in the first weeks of this

research, what she was preparing for. She simply gathered information, the way she'd always gathered

information—systematically, methodically, the way you approach a problem when the stakes are too high for

guesswork.

By the time the spring had properly arrived, turning the city warm and bright and full of the particular

restlessness that good weather brings, Emerald had a plan. It was not a plan she was ready to execute yet. But

she had it.

And holding it—holding the possibility of truth, even before the truth had been confirmed—felt, she

discovered, like something she'd needed without knowing it: a direction. A question that had been waiting,

patiently, for nearly nineteen years, finally on the verge of being answered.

Outside, the city bloomed. And inside the pocket of her coat, against her hip, she carried a letter from

Alexis about a book they'd both read, and a question she wasn't ready to ask yet, and the particular, quiet weight

of things that were still becoming.

It was enough, for now. It was more than enough.