Rose was six weeks old when I found the letter.
Not a threatening letter. Not a legal document or a new clause or another layer of the architecture that had surrounded the beginning of this marriage. Something older and stranger and more personal than any of those.
I found it in the library.
I had been reorganizing the lower shelf, the one that had been in a state of productive disorder since I arrived and that I had never quite gotten to because there was always something more immediate. Rose was with Mrs. Aldren and Damien was at the tower and the November afternoon was the kind that made indoor tasks feel right, and I was working through the shelf when my hand found a gap between two volumes and in the gap, folded once, a piece of paper.
The paper was old. Not ancient, but aged, the
