“You know why.” I was done pretending otherwise.
(I don’t think he ever forgave me. After my incarceration he visited often, at first. Every time he came he asked me to let him make things right. Every time, I refused. I knew by then that I would survive my time in prison, quietly counting down the days until all my sins had been atoned for. But his was a softer soul, sunk in sin to the hilt, and I wasn’t sure he would. Every time he took my refusal a little bit harder. The very last time he came was six years after my conviction, six months since I’d seen him. He looked older, ill, exhausted. “Oliver, I’m begging you,” he said. “I can’t do this anymore.” When I refused again, he pulled my hand across the table, kissed it, and turned to leave. I asked where he was going and he said, “Hell. Del Norte. Nowhere. I don’t know.”)
My trial was mercifully short. Filippa and James and Alexander were all dragged in to testify, but Meredith refused to say a word in my defense or otherwise, and gave every question the same useless answer: “I don’t remember.” My resolve cracked a little every time I looked at her. Other familiar faces I avoided. Wren’s and Richard’s parents’. Leah’s and my mother’s, blotchy and tearstained and distant. When it came time for me to speak for myself, I recited my written confession without emotion or embellishment, as if it were just another monologue I’d memorized. At the end, everyone seemed to be expecting an apology, but I didn’t have one to give them. What could I say? This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.
We settled on second-degree murder (plus time for obstruction of justice) before the jury ever reached a verdict. A bus took me a few miles downstate. I turned in my clothes and my personal belongings, and began my ten-year penance on the same day that the Dellecher school year ended.
Colborne’s face was the last familiar one I saw. “You know, it’s not too late,” he said. “If there’s another version of the truth you want to tell me.”
I wanted, in some strange way, to thank him for refusing to believe me.
“I am myself indifferent honest,” I admitted. “But yet I could accuse me of such things that it were better my mother had not borne me. What should such fellows as I do crawling between earth and heaven? We are arrant knaves, all. Believe none of us.”
EPILOGUE
I feel, at the end of my story, sapped of life, as if I have been bleeding freely for the past few hours instead of simply speaking. “Demand me nothing,” I say to Colborne. “What you know, you know: / From this time forth I will never speak a word.”
I turn away from the Tower window and avoid his eyes as I walk past him, toward the stairs. He follows me down to the library in respectful silence. Filippa is there, sitting on the couch, a copy of Winter’s Tale open in her lap. She looks up, and the fading evening light darts across her glasses. My heart is a little lighter at the sight of her.
“It is almost morning,” she says to Colborne, “and yet I am sure you are not satisfied / Of these events in full.”
“Well, I can’t ask much more of Oliver,” he says. “He’s confirmed a few long-standing suspicions.”
“Will you rest easier with one less mystery on your mind?”
“Honestly, I don’t know. I thought some closure would make it more bearable, but now I’m not so sure.”
I drift to the edge of the room and stare down at the long black burn on the carpet. Now that I’ve told Colborne everything I feel unmoored. I have nothing of my own now, not even secrets.
The sound of my name makes me turn back toward the others.
“Oliver, will you tolerate one last question?” Colborne asks.
“You can ask,” I say. “I won’t promise to answer.”
“Fair enough.” He glances at Filippa, then looks back at me again. “What’s next for you? I’m just wondering. What happens now?”
The answer is so obvious I’m surprised it hasn’t occurred to him. I hesitate at first, protective of it. But then I meet Filippa’s eyes and I realize she’s wondering, too.
“I’m supposed to go stay with my sister—you remember Leah. She’s doing her doctorate at Chicago,” I say. “I wouldn’t blame the rest of my family if they didn’t want to see me. But more than that—you must know—more than anything, I just need to see James.”
Something strange happens now. I don’t see in their faces the exasperation I’m expecting. Instead Colborne turns toward Filippa, eyes wide with alarm. She sits up straighter on the couch and lifts one hand to stop him speaking.
“Pip?” I say. “What’s wrong?”
She stands slowly, smoothing invisible wrinkles from the front of her jeans. “There’s something I haven’t told you.” I swallow, fighting an urge to run out of the room and never find out what she means to say next. But I stay where I am, glued to the spot by the fear that not knowing is worse. “I was afraid that if I told you while you were inside, you’d never want to come out,” she says. “So I waited.”
“Tell me what?” I say. “Tell me what?”
“Oh, Oliver,” she says, her voice a distant echo of itself. “I’m so sorry. James is gone.”
The world drops out from underneath me. My hand gropes blindly for the bookshelf beside me, for something to hold on to. I stare down at the burn on the carpet, listening for my own heartbeat and hearing nothing. “When?” is all I manage to say.
“Four years ago,” she says, quietly. “Four years ago now.”
Colborne bows his head. Why? Is he ashamed that he dragged the story out of me and all the while he knew, and I didn’t?