Vera's letter is four pages.
The handwriting is careful not the hurried handwriting of someone working quickly but the deliberate handwriting of someone who has thought about every word before committing it to paper. Four pages of the specific, organized clarity of a woman who had something to say and took the time to say it correctly.
I read it in the meeting room with Faye beside me and the Saturday afternoon outside the window and the compound's noise in the distance.
She begins with the facts, as I would have.
She was thirty-eight when she wrote it, which would make me twenty-four. She had known I was alive and building something in the northern territories for nine years by that point, she says she learned of my existence through Dmitri, who had maintained peripheral contact with
