Chapter 408: The Last Letter

He handled all three before ten.

At eleven Max sent the full background file on Margaret Walsh. Sean had asked for it a week ago when he confirmed the Tuesday visit. He had wanted to know everything available before he walked into that corridor.

He read it over lunch.

Seventy-six years old. Retired schoolteacher, thirty-one years. The same house for thirty-eight years. The same church since 1994. A daughter, Catherine Anne Walsh, born 1981, died 2014 at thirty-three. A son-in-law who had left before Catherine’s diagnosis. No grandchildren recorded in any public document.

Until now.

The garden the neighbor had mentioned to Eleanor Vance. Small, on the south side of the house. She tended it herself.

He read that line and held it.

He thought about a woman who raised Catherine, who had watched Catherine raise a son she never knew existed, who had received a letter from that son eight months after finding out he was alive, and who had replied within two days.

Who had been ready since the third letter.

He closed the file.

===

James drove him to the hospital at one thirty.

The clinic was on the third floor of the east wing. He found the waiting area. A row of chairs. A window that looked over the hospital’s east courtyard, which had a tree in it that someone had planted a long time ago and that had become large enough to be the dominant thing in the courtyard.

He sat.

He watched the tree.

At one fifty-two he heard footsteps in the corridor. Not Margaret’s — someone coming from the clinical side. He looked up.

A woman in a white coat. Tall. Mixed race. Natural hair worn loose around her shoulders, which was unusual for a clinical setting and which she appeared entirely unbothered by. Dark brown eyes that moved across the waiting area the way a doctor’s did — assessing, not social.

She looked at the chairs. At the corridor. At Sean.

She stopped.

"Are you a patient," she said.

"No," said Sean.

"Waiting for someone."

"Yes."

"The clinic runs late on Tuesdays," she said. "Standard twenty minutes."

"I know," he said. "I checked the schedule."

She looked at him.

Not the social look. The other one.

"You checked the clinic schedule," she said.

"I wanted to be here when she came out," he said. "Not twenty minutes after."

She held his gaze for a moment.

Then she went back down the corridor.

Sean went back to the tree.

At two eleven he heard her footsteps again. She came back along the corridor and sat in the chair beside him.

"I’m Nadia," she said.

"Sean," he said.

"You’re her grandson," she said.

"Yes," he said.

She held his gaze for a moment with the dark brown eyes. Not the social calibration. The medical read. Looking for something specific.

"She talks about you," she said. "She reads your letters more than once. I’ve seen her do it in the waiting room."

He looked at the clinic door.

"Is she ready for this," he said.

"She’s been ready since the third letter," said Nadia. "She was waiting for you to be."

He held that.

"How do you know about the third letter," he said.

"She told me," said Nadia. "She tells me things. I’m her doctor and she’s decided I’m also someone she talks to." A pause. "I didn’t object."

The clinic door opened.

===

Margaret Walsh was small.

That was the first thing. Seventy-six years old and small in the specific way of someone who had always been compact rather than someone diminished by age. White hair, cut short and practical. Dark eyes — Catherine’s eyes, or rather Catherine had had her eyes, the quality of them, that specific directness that Sean recognized from photographs and from looking in the mirror.

She came out of the clinic and stopped when she saw him.

She looked at him.

He stood.

She walked toward him.

She stopped a foot away and held his face in both hands. Not dramatically. Not crying. Just holding it, the way you held something you had been waiting to hold, carefully and completely.

She looked at him.

"You have her nose," she said. "I told myself I wasn’t going to say that first."

"It’s a good thing to say," he said.

She put her hands down.

"Yes," she said. "I suppose it is."

She looked at Nadia.

"You two have met," she said.

"Just now," said Nadia.

"Good," said Margaret. She looked at Sean. "She’s the best doctor I’ve had in thirty years. I’m telling you that so you know the standard I hold people to."

"Noted," said Sean.

"I have a coffee place I like," said Margaret. "One floor down. They know my order. Will you come?"

"Yes," he said.

She walked toward the elevator. Sean fell into step beside her.

Behind them Nadia watched them go.

Then she went back to her rounds.

====

The coffee place was a small café on the second floor near the hospital’s main atrium. The woman behind the counter looked up when Margaret came in and started making something without being asked.

They sat at a table by the window.

"Tea for me," said Margaret to the woman. "Whatever he wants."

He ordered coffee.

They sat.

Margaret looked at him across the table with the full version of the dark eyes.

"You’re taller than I expected," she said.

"You’re shorter," he said.

She almost smiled. "Catherine was five foot four. I’m five foot two. Your father must have been tall."

He said nothing.

"You don’t have to tell me about him," she said. "That’s not what today is for." She held her tea when it arrived. "Today is for me to look at you and for you to look at me and for us to understand that we are actually real."

"Yes," he said.

"The letters were real," she said. "But letters are a specific kind of real. The person on the other end is real but they are also partly constructed. You imagine them." She held her tea. "I have been imagining you for four months."