Page 100 of One Last Thing
‘Hm.’
‘This is what you wanted. What you’ve worked for.’
‘Yeah. It is.’
‘They’d be stupid if they didn’t give you this promotion.’
‘They would.’
‘You want to borrow a shirt? Or I can go back to your room to get your clothes if you’d like?’ he offers.
I’m staring at the box of ashes that Mum gave Nico to give to me and the letter propped up against it. I frown at it.
‘Why did she give you the letter?’ I blurt out.
He follows my eyeline and shrugs. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I get why she gave you the ashes because she knows I still need to scatter them, but why would she give you the letter? We already know what it says. That day in the office, she said that Dad had written the same thing he’d written to me. To listen to you and carry out the tasks and then we’d get the house. That’s what she said, wasn’t it?’
He looks uncertain. ‘I can’t remember.’
‘Surely, she’d want to keep that letter. She wouldn’t give it away. It’s Dad’s last letter to her and she’s been banging on about how much she . . .’
I muster the courage to crawl off the bed and grab the envelope, pulling out the letter that came with the same pamphlet I got of the house. Dad’s handwriting is so bad I have to squint at it to read it properly.
To my dear Dawn,
I hope you are pleased with the rather elaborate purchase I’ve made in our daughter’s name. At least be grateful I didn’t buy her that pony she always wanted. She’d have had to keep it at yours since she simply doesn’t have the space, so you’re welcome. I hope she’llbe happy with her Collioure home but please do ask her not to paint the shutters. It should always be the pretty, blue-shuttered house you can see from the boat.
Humour me and throw yourself into this quest I’m sending you on together. I’m only hoping to create moments that might not have been created otherwise. That’s, I think, the hardest part of all this. Knowing I will miss so many still to come. But I was fortunate to share an abundance with you, never enough, but more than I might have hoped for –thank you for letting me be a part of your ever-enchanting world, Dawn.
I would write something moving, like how I’ll be there with you every step of the journey, but you know that already because the two of us, we’re part of Megan. When she really laughs, she laughs just like you, you know. Hearing that laugh from either of you was, I know now, the greatest joy and honour of my life.
Always your darling, my darling,
Henry
I read through the letter twice and then lower it, my brain scrabbling its way through the thoughts spiralling around it like an unpredictable tornado.
‘Wait, the house . . . the house is for me,’ I say to Nico.
‘What?’ he says, understandably confused since I’ve given him no context.
‘It says here the house is for me. Not for both of us, for me. He talks about it being a purchase in my name, not in both of our names. In this letter to Mum, he talks about it being “her house”, not “your house” as in it’smyhouse.’
He stares at me wide-eyed. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘Why would she stay here and do all these things when she wasn’t getting the house?’ I ask, waving the letter in the air. ‘The whole time she made me believe that we had to do all these tasks so thatbothof us would get the dream house. That was the deal.’
‘So the house is yours, but not hers?’ Nico checks.
‘Yes.’
‘Oh. That’s nice.’
‘Nice?’ I start pacing around the room, Nico’s eyes following me the whole time. ‘It doesn’t make any sense! Why would she stay and do all these activities together when there was nothing in it for her at the end?’
‘Maybe she didn’t see it that way.’
