Part One: Six Days

The envelope came on a Thursday, six days after the funeral, in the ordinary post between a dental reminder and a catalogue for garden furniture I have never bought anything from.

It was a thick white business envelope, the kind with a security pattern printed inside it, and my name and address were on the front in his handwriting.

I knew the handwriting before I knew anything else.

I had watched that hand fill in hospice intake forms three weeks earlier, holding the clipboard at an angle because of the tremor, and it takes a particular kind of effort to write like that and I had sat next to it for forty minutes.

The postmark was the day before he died.

I want to describe what I did in the first four seconds, because it is the only part of this that I am still able to be tender about.

I smiled.

I stood in my own hallway with my coat still on and I smiled, because I assumed it was a goodbye.

Because he was a man who could not take a paper cup of coffee out of my hand without thanking me three separate times, and I assumed that what was inside that envelope was three pages of that.

I went into the front room and sat down in the armchair by the window, still in my coat, and opened it properly with a finger rather than tearing it, because I already knew I was going to keep it.

Four sheets of lined yellow legal paper, written on one side only.

And the first sentence was an apology, and I read it three times without understanding it at all.

Hannah, I need to apologize before I thank you.

My name is Hannah Doerr.

I was thirty-two that winter.

I am thirty-five now and I am writing this at the same table where I read that letter, and it has taken me three years to be able to, and the reason it took three years is not grief.

It is that for the first four months I was the wrong kind of angry, and then for about a year I was the wrong kind of forgiving, and it has taken until now to arrive at a version that is neither, and I am not entirely there.