Is Tears Lighter Than Snow

Chapter 4 The Letters

I waited until Thursday, two days before the wedding, when Nathan was at a lunch with the board chair and the office was empty except for Amy at the front desk. I said I'd forgotten a checkbook, and Amy, who liked me, let me in and went back to her screen.

The Ridgewood files were in a gray cabinet behind Nathan's desk. I opened it and found the file instantly, because he was a man who filed things, and inside, on top of the survey maps and the grant paperwork, was a bundle tied with a blue ribbon.

I sat down in his chair and untied it.

There were thirty-one letters. They were written in a small, neat hand on cream paper, and they began when Julie was twenty-three and ended three months ago. I did not read all of them. I read enough. I read the first, which began with her name for him, a name no one else used, and I read the ones from the middle, in which she described the rented rooms she had lived in and the jobs that had ended and the dog that had died, and I read the last, in which she wrote: You are getting married. I saw the announcement. I am not going to say anything, because there is nothing left to say. But I want you to know that I keep everything. I keep the ring. I keep the photograph from the courthouse. And I am not angry, which is the strangest part, because I always thought I would be angry forever, and instead I just wait for you to be happy and then I wait for you to be unhappy again. And it always comes.

I read that letter twice. Then I read the letter before it, and then I stopped reading and sat there with the whole bundle in my lap and did not move for a long time.

He was not having an affair. That was the thing. There was no affair. There was only a man who had married someone, ended it, and never quite ended it, who kept thirty-one letters in a drawer and never answered a single one and never threw a single one away. There was nothing I could point at. There was no lipstick, no hotel, no other apartment. There was only a drawer.

And somehow that was worse.

I thought about the seventh year, and the eighth, and what my life would look like from the inside: a woman who was chosen, who was useful, who fit the position, who would go to galas and be kind to donors and never know that on the other side of the city there was a woman who kept the ring from a courthouse in Maine and wrote once a month and waited.

I put the letters back in the ribbon and the file and the cabinet, locked it, and left the office. I did not take anything. That surprised me later, that I didn't take anything.

I went home and Nathan was there, sitting on the sofa with his phone, and he looked up and said, "You're pale. Are you sick?"

"No," I said. And then, because I could not help myself, because I had spent seven years being careful and it had gone bad in my hands, I said, "Who is Julie Marbury?"

There was a silence that lasted three seconds, and in those three seconds I watched his face and saw it arrive: not surprise, not guilt, but something closer to relief. He set the phone down. He didn't stand up. He didn't deny it.

"Who told you," he said.

"Does it matter?"

"No." He looked at the floor for a moment, and then up at me. "It was a long time ago. It was over before I met you."

"The letters are still in your desk."

Something moved in his face then, the first real alarm I had ever seen on him, and I understood that the letters were the one thing he had kept from himself, the one c***k in the wall. "You went through my files."

"I did."

"That was—"

"I know what it was. I want to know what it was to you."

He stood up then. "Lizzie. Sit down."

"No."

"Sit down." He said it in a tone I had never heard him use, not loud, but flat, the tone of a man who had been managing this for a long time and was tired of the expense. And I sat down, because I was still the woman who sat down when he asked.

"This doesn't change anything," he said. "Listen to me. This doesn't change anything. I chose you. I have chosen you every day for seven years. Julie knows that. Julie has known that from the beginning. She is not asking me for anything. She writes because she writes. I keep the letters because they are a record of a mistake I made when I was twenty-four, and if you want me to throw them away, I will throw them away tonight."

"Did you ever answer her?"

"No."

"Not one?"

"Not one." He came and crouched in front of me and took my hands, and his hands were steady, and I looked at his hands and thought, He has never once been afraid in his life. "Lizzie. Look at me. Do you love me?"

"Yes."

"Then marry me Saturday. And I will spend the rest of my life making this up to you."

I sat there and looked at him and felt the floor tilt, the way it had tilted on the stairs. And what I felt was not hate. What I felt was the exact opposite of hate, which is the thing I had spent seven years being told I was too dangerous to feel. And that was when I understood what I had to do, not because I wanted to be cruel, but because I refused to be the last person in the room again.

"All right," I said. "I'll marry you."

He kissed my forehead. He was so gentle. He was always so gentle.