Robert’s letter arrived in November.
He had read the book.
He wrote, as he had promised, what he thought, and he wrote it in the deliberate way of a man who does not waste words and knows, now, in the seventy-three year old way of someone who has been recently ill and recovered but received the message, that words not spoken are the most reliable regret.
He wrote twelve pages.
He wrote about his father and his father’s father and the specific inheritance of a family that had learned to hold people at the distance required to manage them. He wrote about Damien’s mother, more than he had ever said in person, the full version of what he understood now about what he had done and what it had cost. He wrote about Callum and Callum’s mother and the fire, not the version that excused anything
