Taya's letter arrived on a morning when the twins were being particularly difficult about breakfast and the packhouse was operating at the specific frequency of controlled chaos that six-month-olds produced without any apparent effort or intention.
Rowan left it on the archive desk with his usual notation, personal correspondence, and I did not get to it until the afternoon, when both children were asleep and the packhouse had settled back into something resembling its ordinary pace, and I took it to the archive with a cup of tea and read it in the quiet that the room held best.
It was long. Longer than I had expected from Taya, who had struck me, on the single occasion I had met her, as someone who said precisely what was necessary and stopped there. This letter was four pages, written
