Read Chapter 17: ANNA

Evelyn returned in May.

She looked lighter.

Not younger, not transformed—just less braced.

“I told Anna,” she said.

Maeve put down a box of new arrivals.

“How did it go?”

“She was furious for twenty minutes, then sad for two hours, then asked practical questions for three days.”

“Sounds healthy.”

“She’s an accountant.”

“That explains the order.”

Evelyn smiled. “She wants to meet you.”

“Me?”

“She says if a stranger read forty-three love letters about her mother, the stranger is practically family or a criminal.”

“Possibly both.”

Anna Keane came the following Saturday. She was forty, with Evelyn’s eyes and Liam’s broad smile from the photographs. She carried the biscuit tin.

“I thought you should see what I’m doing with them.”

Inside, each letter had been placed in an archival sleeve.

Maeve looked at Evelyn.

“I thought you might burn them.”

“So did I.”

Anna said, “Mam has discovered preservation materials. God help us.”

Evelyn ignored her.

They had decided to keep the letters in the family, not donate them, not publish them. Anna had read only the final one so far.

“I loved my father,” she said carefully. “This doesn’t change that.”

Maeve nodded.

“It changes my mother. Or my idea of her.” Anna looked at Evelyn. “She was always Mam. I forgot she had an entire life before I arrived.”

Evelyn said dryly, “Children are notorious narcissists.”

Anna laughed.

Maeve watched them and felt a small ache for the mother she had known only until sixteen. What letters existed in her parents’ drawers? What versions of them had died before Maeve knew to ask?

She could not retrieve those lives.

But perhaps adulthood included accepting that people remained partly unknowable even when loved.

Before leaving, Anna handed Maeve an envelope.

“Tom’s cousin found another thing.”

Maeve froze.

“Not another letter to Evelyn?”

“No. To Nora.”

This one was dated 2003.

Nora,

You said today that I mistake waiting for fidelity. I have considered this and decided you are insufferable.

You are also right.

I do not know how to stop waiting without feeling I have betrayed what mattered. Perhaps that is the trick: we turn old pain into a duty because duty is easier than admitting we are frightened of a new life.

Do not quote me on that.

Tom

Maeve handed the page to Julian that evening.

He read it and looked at her.

“Don’t.”

“I didn’t—”

“Your entire face is an academic eyebrow.”

He laughed.

Maeve took back the letter.

“Old pain into a duty,” she said.

“Yes.”

She thought of the way she had protected grief as if moving forward would diminish her parents. The way she kept Nora’s flat unchanged. The way leaving had become proof that she needed no one.

“I want to move some of Nora’s things,” she said.

Julian did not ask which things or why.

“Okay.”

They spent Sunday sorting the flat.

Maeve kept Nora’s mugs, the green ledger, six detective novels, and a hideous ceramic dog that Nora had loved. She donated clothes, recycled old newspapers, gave furniture to a neighbour’s son moving into his first flat.

In Nora’s bedroom wardrobe, Maeve found a box marked KATHLEEN AND SEAMUS.

Her parents.

Inside were photographs, school reports, birthday cards, and a cassette tape labelled MAEVE SINGING, AGE 5 — TERRIBLE.

Maeve sat on the bed laughing and crying at once.

Julian found an old player at a charity shop two days later.

They listened together.

Five-year-old Maeve sang half of “Molly Malone,” forgot the words, and accused her father of distracting her.

Her mother’s laughter filled the room.

Maeve did not break.

She listened twice.