IMLTHO

...

she has gone through many versions of how she thinks of him in relation to her. 

he’s my father. he’s a stranger. he’s my dad. he’s a loser. he tried. he didn’t try hard enough. he is nothing. 

and sometimes, in those rare moments when he remembers--when her own eyes stare back at her from a face slackened and aged beyond its years--

he is everything. 

...

she cries when she gets the letter, chicken-scratch characters running off the page in all directions. the musings, ramblings, and chastisements of a madman. she has always thought about the timing of his departure, of her mother’s descriptions of her colicky babyhood--there were some nights you didn’t stop crying at all--and, in some small corner, let grow the thought

what if I--

and here, written in a slant across the top of the first page, in penmanship without a trace of the elegance her mother sometimes used to boast about (he used to write the most beautiful calligraphy), is proof. 

the spare, jagged characters are the most carefully written.

‘INSUFFICIENT’ 

yes. she knows.

...

but, at least he thought of her? Mary pours her daughter a cup of tea, pushes it to her across the kitchen table, smiles and shrugs. “Oren never got a letter.”

no, she thinks, letting her spoon clink against the cup’s edges. just the best three years. winces at the ugliness of the thought.

“I guess that’s true.”

...

she turns forty and breathes a sigh of relief.

safe. 

if it hasn’t happened to her yet, it won’t. 

probably.

...

of course she knows the letter was carefully written. and of course sherlock won’t allow her her excuses.

but the wrong words, even (especially) written carefully, can still dismantle a heart. can take a thing that was already in pieces and shake it even further beyond repair. 

she doesn’t want to allow voice to the piece of her that hopes--that sits in her chest, still shaped like the seven year old Joan whose father for the first and only time remembered her birthday and came home clean and clear-eyed. but it speaks anyway, sneaking in around the edges of her concentration. 

 he might, after all, give you a reason to miss him. 

which is, more than anything, what she’s worried about.

...

no dirty bomb.

sigh of relief.

she stands at the kitchen window with the letter in her hands for several minutes. neatly slices open the envelope with a paring knife. 

no bombshells there either. 

sigh of...what? reliefconfusiondisappointmentunderstanding

she decides on gratitude, and slips the letter back into its sleeve.

...

oranges in a bag. feet in shoes. soft tread over the uneven ground beneath the pines where the headstone rests.

searches Lin’s face for their father’s, finds it in the corners of the mouth, the straight length of her eyebrows, the shape of her (their, she realizes) nose. 

smiles.