The letter was one page. Nick had crossed out a line halfway down rather than starting again on a clean sheet.
Claire,
I keep trying to write an explanation that makes what I did smaller. There isn’t one. You asked me not to use the passes for your family. I agreed. Then I gave Daniel what he wanted because I thought I could manage the result better than you could.
I didn’t put it in those words to myself. That doesn’t change what it was.
I wanted the evening to go well for me, and I made you carry the risk. I’m sorry. I’ve told Daniel there will be no more conversations about you through me. Rhys and Helen know the decision was mine.
You don’t need to answer this. I wanted you to have an apology that didn’t ask you to help me feel better about it.
Nick
I read it twice. The crossed-out line was still legible: I was trying to protect—
He had stopped there.
I put the page down and made tea. I didn’t know whether the letter changed anything. It did not give me back the evening. It did not make his promise unbroken. But it was the first account of what happened that did not require me to argue with it.
The next morning, the formal offer arrived from Manchester.
I printed it at the theater and read it during lunch with a pencil in my hand. The fee was reasonable. The dates were possible. There were things to clarify, as there always were, but none of them disguised a demand that I prove I deserved to be there by working for nothing.
Mina sat opposite me eating an apple.
“Well?”
“I’m going to accept.”
“Good.”
“I need to ask about two things first.”
“Ask. Then accept.”
I smiled. “You make everything sound simple.”
“Only other people’s lives. Mine is chaos.”
I sent the questions before I could make another list of reasons to hesitate.
That afternoon, Mum rang. I let the phone ring three times before answering.
“Have you a minute?”
“A few.”
“I wanted to apologize about Friday.”
I closed the wardrobe door so the rehearsal noise became muffled.
“All right.”
She took a breath. “I thought if we were already there, perhaps there could be a moment afterward. Not in front of everyone. I shouldn’t have let Daniel speak to Nick about it.”
“You knew he was asking?”
“Yes.”
I looked at the wall. Somebody had taped a reminder there about returning mugs to the kitchen. It seemed extraordinary that the same world contained such manageable requests.
“Why didn’t you ask me?”
“Because I thought you’d say no.”
There it was, at last, without a reason attached to why my no might not count.
“Yes,” I said. “I would have.”
Mum was quiet.
“I keep thinking there must be a way to get everyone in one room,” she said. “As if the room would do something I haven’t managed.”
“It won’t.”
“I’m beginning to understand that.”
I heard something in her voice that wasn’t only sadness. Weariness, perhaps, at discovering that the methods she had used for years no longer produced the result she expected.
“Sophie told me to stop,” she said. “Afterward. She said you had been clear with her, and that she should have asked before accepting the pass.”
I sat on the stool by the door.
“She should have.”
“Yes.”
We were quiet again. I could hear Mum moving a cup on its saucer. She had probably made tea before ringing, something to hold while she spoke.
“I’m not asking you to come to the wedding,” she said. “Or to see them. I wanted you to know that.”
“Thank you.”
The word felt strange. Not forgiveness, not relief. Only recognition that she had finally stopped asking for the thing I could not give.
“Could I see you?” she asked. “Just me. Another day, if today isn’t right.”
I looked at the unfinished work on the table.
“Thursday. I could come for an hour.”
“I’ll make lunch.”
“Tea, Mum. Just tea.”
She paused. “All right. Tea.”
On Thursday, she opened the door without a casserole, a speech or anyone standing behind her. That helped more than she probably knew.
The house smelled of furniture polish and the lavender soap she kept in the downstairs bathroom. Nothing had changed enough to explain why I felt cautious entering it. My school photograph still stood on the hall table beside Sophie’s. In mine, I looked as though I had been instructed not to waste the photographer’s time.
Mum followed my gaze.
“You hated that fringe.”
“You said it was practical.”
She smiled faintly. “I said that about a lot of things.”
We had tea in the kitchen. She had made biscuits but left them in a tin rather than arranging a whole meal around my arrival. I took one. It tasted of ginger and a little too much baking, exactly as it always had.
For a while we talked about the play. She had liked the costumes. She described a detail in the green coat that I hadn’t expected her to notice, the way it changed when Ruth stopped holding herself so rigidly.
“That was the idea,” I said.
“I thought it might be.”
I looked at her. It was good to hear her talk about something I had made without immediately connecting it to what I could do for someone else.
“I’ve been offered work in Manchester,” I said.
She set down her cup. “For how long?”
“Six weeks. Late August.”
“Will you take it?”
“Yes.”
I had not yet signed the returned terms, but the answer was already mine.
Mum nodded. I could see questions arranging themselves behind her face: the flat, the theater, the cost, whether I would be alone. She chose a different one.
“What will you be making?”
I told her. She listened. Once she interrupted to ask about the room provided, then stopped herself and said, “Sorry. The clothes first.”
I laughed. She looked relieved, then pleased, and for a few minutes we found something that resembled our old ease without requiring me to forget why it had gone.
Before I left, she brought out a small box of Dad’s things she had found while sorting a drawer. There were cufflinks, a broken watch, a cinema ticket folded around nothing. She asked whether I wanted any of it.
I picked up the watch. It had stopped at twenty past seven. I could remember him holding it to his ear, as if he might hear what was wrong.
“I don’t know yet.”
“You can leave it here.”
I looked up. “Yes. I can.”
She understood something in my answer and looked away.
At the door she said, “I was proud of how you managed when he died.”
I held my bag against my side.
“I know.”
“I think I mistook managing for not needing anything.”
My throat tightened. I had wanted her to understand that for so long that hearing it did not feel the way I had imagined. There was no great release. Only a little space opening around something I had carried tightly for years.
“I did need things,” I said.
“Yes.”
She touched my arm, then waited. I let her hug me. It was brief and awkward, and I was still angry with her when it ended. I was also glad I had come.
Back at the theater, I found Nick onstage in rehearsal clothes, working through a scene with Ruth. There was no audience, no costume, no flattering light. He stopped halfway through a speech and asked her to try the line again because he hadn’t listened properly the first time.
I stood at the back for a minute before going upstairs.
Later, Rhys mentioned that Nick’s conversation with Elsa about the winter tour was set for Saturday morning, by video. The original tape had done enough to get him that far. I felt a small, uncomplicated gladness before everything else returned to complicate it.
That night, I read his letter once more.
Then I sent a message.
Would you like coffee on Saturday afternoon? After your call.
I put the phone down and went to wash a cup that was already clean.
His reply arrived before I had finished drying it.
Yes. Very much.
We chose the café by the old station, away from the theater and the harbor. Somewhere we had not yet made a memory.