"He was a good man," she said. "My husband. Whatever else this letter makes him — messenger, secret-keeper, coward of a different kind — he was a good man. I need you to know that."
"I know," Thomas said. And he did.
When Ava stirred, near eleven, Monique walked Thomas to the door. On the threshold, in the spill of the porch light Marcus had loved, she said, "Thank you for not running. When she came for you. When I told you don't. Most people would have taken the letter and left me with the mess."
"The mess was already mine," Thomas said. "It just took twenty-five years to be delivered."
---
He walked home well after midnight.
The plaid shirt clung to his back in the mild October air. Laurel Court was asleep. His own porch light was still on; he had left it burning when Ava pulled him across the grass. He unlocked his door, stepped into the silence of a house that had been empty of family for years — empty since the divorce, emptier since his mother's death — and set Andrew's letter on the kitchen table beneath the single overhead bulb.
He read it again.