Page 151 of The Next Lie

A letter for me arrives the next morning.

It’s waiting on the silver charger in the front hall, sitting on top of an electric bill, a thick cream envelope addressed to Nash, and something glossy from a charity that probably wants Blackwood money and has no idea how that money was made.

I know the handwriting before I touch it. My stomach swoops and then drops.

Deacon.

The letters used to come to Chicago, written on plain note paper and folded into equally plain envelopes with no return address. I never knew where they were mailed from. I never knew whose hand had written them. I used to sit on the edge of my bed after bad shifts and trace the slant of the words with my thumb, imagining a faceless person somewhere in the world who could read the ugliest parts of me without flinching.

Ash, he told me to call him.

Not Deacon Cross. Not the man with the rosary tattoo. Not the man who kissed me in a kitchen and told me I had been his since before I understood the shape of that word.

I pick up the envelope with my name on the front.

Just Reva. No last name. No sweet little lie for me to hold.

I take it upstairs before anyone sees my face.

Homer follows me into my room, tail high, harness-free and therefore returned to his full power. He jumps onto the bed and attacks the corner of the blanket while I sit at the window with the letter in my lap and try to decide whether opening it counts as weakness.

I’m pretty sure that it does. I open it anyway.

It’s the same plain note paper. White, a little on the thick side. The words are written in black ink with the same precise slant I know better than I want to.

Little Ghost⁠—

You hate that I call you that now. You didn’t always. Once, you sent me an essay about feeling like a ghost in your own life, and I gave you the name because I wanted you to know I heard you.

I still hear you.

I handled Delia badly. I’m not saying I’m sorry because I think I made the wrong choice in protecting her. I did not. She needed protection.

I’m sorry, I guess, for trying to keep both of you on opposite sides of a wire and convincing myself that doing so was the same thing as loyalty.

At some point, I guess I needed to make a choice.

I thought I had chosen you years ago. Quietly. Privately. In a way that kept you breathing and kept me useful to the people who would have buried you—twice—if I slipped.

Quiet choices are sometimes cowardly ones. Mine were.

Last night, I made a pretty obvious choice. It may cost me.

I just wanted you to know that before things began changing…because they’re probably going to start shifting pretty fast now. I want you to understand that whatever I have been, whatever I still am, my line has become more…visible. You are behind it. Anyone who wants to get you will have to cross it.

Stay inside the walls today.

Argue with that if you need to. I will enjoy the attempt.

D.

I read it once.

Then I read it again, my forefinger tracing each line as though it might change in front of me. The third time, my hands shake.

“Fuck this,” I tell the empty room. Homer pauses mid-attack and looks at me. “I’m not doing this.”

He resumes killing the blanket. I crumple the letter into a tight ball and throw it at the trash can beside the desk. It lands beside it with a soft thud and sits there, white paper bent around words I did not ask for.