Letter One
At thirty years old, an hour and a half after he buries his wife, Sam Evans punches a hole in the wall for the first time.
He isn't a man prone to flashes of temper, or even flickers. Anger, for him, simmers down deep in his chest like the magma of a sleeping volcano. Other emotions, happier emotions, are much easier for him and much closer to the surface. Sam is—or was, at least a month ago—an easy-going, cheerful person.
Today, though, it is just too much. He's angry, sure, but he's also devastated, confused. His wife—his Quinn, his beautiful, brilliant, lucky-I'm-in-love-with-my-best-friend soul mate, his Quinn—is gone, and what's almost worse, what might be worse once the grief becomes less of an ax blade in his stomach and more of a punch, is that she knew, she knew for thirty fucking days, and she didn't tell him.
The only reason he knows now is because of the letters, the letters that she wrote almost every day, when he was asleep or at work or just too stupid to be aware, the letters that she kept in a locked wooden jewelry box on the closet shelf, the letters that she told Judy about.
"I don't know what's in them," Judy had said, her eyes like marbles, blue and pretty but glassy, emotionless. "She just mentioned them to me before—before—and she told me she wanted you to read them."
His mother-in-law touched his arm, and some compassion came back into her gaze. "She loved you so very much, Sam," she told him, the gentleness in her tone shoving the ax a little deeper. "No one made her as happy as you did."
So now he's sitting on his bed, the bed he shared with her, the bed he'll have to sleep alone in for the first time in six years, with the box open next to him and the first letter in his hand. He's been sitting here for the past ninety minutes, but he can't get past the first paragraph.
Dear Sam,
By the time you read this letter, I'll probably be gone; I wish I had more time to spend with you, with our babies, but this is just the way things are. I'm so sorry, sweetheart, and I love you so much. I know you won't think so at this point, because I've left you, because I've kept this a secret, but I do. Oh, God, I do love you.
He wants to crumple the letter up in his fist, wants to throw the whole damn box away, but he can't. He can't, because it was the last thing Quinn will ever give him, because it was her hand that moved the pen and brushed the page, because she wanted him to read them.
"Daddy?"
Sam looks up to find his oldest son, his only son, six year old Chris, standing in the doorway, his little black suit ill-fitted because they had to borrow it from Rachel and Noah's son, Billy, who is two years older.
He briefly thanks God that this child looks almost exactly like him. He couldn't deal with Lily right now, his little ray of sunshine that looks so much like Quinn that it would only serve to shove that ax so deep it may sever his spine, and he'll never move again.
"Hey, buddy," Sam says, shifting guiltily in front of the hole in the wall so that he blocks it with his body. "Come here."
The boy crawls onto the bed and burrows his head in Sam's chest, his little arms cinching as tightly as they can around his waist. Sam's throat tightens until it's the width of an apple stem, and he presses his lips to the crown of his son's head.
When he realizes Chris is crying—when he hears the shaky, wet breaths, feels the sobs vibrating through his incredibly small back—Sam bites his tongue, hard enough to draw blood, so that he won't cry, too.
"It's okay," he murmurs. "It's going to be okay, I promise."
"Daddy," comes the cracked, muffled voice. "I don't understand."
He closes his eyes so tightly that the muscles in his cheeks ache.
"I don't either, little man. I don't either."
/
Later, when his kids are fast asleep, Sam sits at the kitchen table, where the chair isn't as nearly as comfortable as his bed and he isn't at risk of falling asleep. He doesn't want to sleep, not with her handwriting printed on the backs of his lids or with her words streaming through his mind.
Dear Sam,
By the time you read this letter, I'll probably be gone; I wish I had more time to spend with you, with our babies, but this is just the way things are. I'm so sorry, sweetheart, and I love you so much. I know you won't think so at this point, because I've left you, because I've kept this a secret, but I do. Oh, God, I do love you.
Do you want to know when I knew? You'd think, because of what I did, because of my mistake, that it would be after you came back to Lima. But it was the time you convinced me to see Avatar, and we sat on the couch in your living room, and you were glued to the screen. If I hadn't known how many times you'd seen it, I would have thought this was your first.
Instead of watching the movie, I watched you. You laughed, you gaped, you got emotional as if you had never seen it before. You were so absorbed that I probably could have stripped down right in front of you and you wouldn't have turned away.
I wanted that. Partly in an envious way—I'd never been that enthusiastic about anything, and I wondered if life would be better like that—but also in the sense that I wanted it in my life. I wanted you to be there with your infectious, puppy-dog grin when you found out I got into college, when I accepted your proposal of marriage, when I told you we were going to have a baby. I wanted that more than I had ever wanted anything, and it threw me for a loop. It scared me.
But we're not going to go into that here, not yet. I just wanted to say that I got what I wanted. I had that smile through all the milestones of my life, of our life, and it means everything.
Love always,
Quinn.
