Chapter 13 — ADAM'S HANDWRITING
I opened it that night, after Emmett left, at about eleven, sitting on the floor with my back against the radiator because the cot took up the chair space.
It is four pages, both sides, in blue ballpoint.
It is dated the second of March.
He died on the ninth of May.
I am not going to reproduce all of it. Some of it is mine.
But there are four things in that letter that matter to this, and I have read them out loud in a courtroom, so they are already public, and I would rather you got them from me.
The first is that he knew.
*I've known since I was twenty-six. Not from her. From a blood test at a work physical that came back with something odd on it and a doctor who said it was interesting and asked if it ran in the family. I looked it up. Then I looked up Dad's chart because I had power of attorney by then and I could. I have known for nine years and I have never said it out loud to a single human being and I am about to write it down, which I am aware is not the same as saying it.*
The second is what he did about it.
*I told Dad. In 2017, in March, in the car park at St. Ambrose after his second stent, because he asked me why I never brought Mum to anything and I was tired.*
*He was quiet for about a minute and then he said, "I know."*
*He said he'd known since I was four.*
*He said he never said anything because he'd decided that the only thing that would come of saying it was that I'd have less than I had that morning.*
*And then he said — and Elise I want you to have this because I have never been able to work out what to do with it — he said, "You're the only thing in that house I chose."*
The third thing is the clause.
*A week after that he changed his will. He didn't tell me what he changed. He told me he'd made it so that she couldn't take anything from anyone, and I thought he meant money.*
The fourth thing is the last paragraph of page four, and it is the reason I read the whole letter to a jury eight months later.
*If you're reading this it's because I put it somewhere and didn't send it, which is the thing I do. There's a man at that house who has been standing four feet away from my entire life. I'm not going to write down what I think because I don't have the right to be wrong about it in ink. But if anything ever happens to me, ask Emmett Cole about the summer of 1999, and then look at his left eyebrow, and then look in the mirror.*
I put the letter down on the floor.
I went and stood over the cot for a while.
My daughter has a very faint mark through her left eyebrow where the hair does not grow, which the midwife had told me was a birthmark and completely ordinary and would probably fade by two.
It has not faded.
She is four now.