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As you know, Giovanni and I were lovers—if a total giving of one’s self to another can be considered love. It was messy, dangerous, in thatway that love can sometimes go, and we’ll never truly put it behind us. There are some people in our lives who will never leave us, despite how hard we try.
The truth, as you know, is that I left him. I couldn’t face being out to my friends and peers, and when he started telling people about us, and the interrogations started, I just had to end it. I was afraid of what everyone thought of me. But still I continued to do wrong. Somehow I found myself in a secret affair with Antoinette in an attempt to prove to the world that I could be what it wanted. Then she fell suddenly pregnant. We were so young—she in her second year at Newnham, and Giovanni and I on the cusp of graduating. It was the worst thing that could’ve happened to either of us. Suddenly I had wronged them both, and yet neither knew of my dealings with the other.
When Giovanni found out about Toni, he spilled every last secret there was to spill. My father was repulsed by everything I’d done, and Giovanni demanded I stay away from both him and his sister, and why wouldn’t he? Antoinette wanted nothing to do with me either. Nor did she plan on keeping the baby. An abortion wasn’t an option for her, but she also wouldn’t parent alone. She would go back to Italy and place the baby up for adoption there. Why should one mistake stop her from getting an education, have her lose her career? She had dreams of being an actress, and I suppose she has fulfilled those dreams. But my father wanted nothing more than to be in that child’s life, and convinced her that the right thing to do was not only to keep the baby in the family but to allow him to bring that child up as his own. The child would be well provided for and deeply, deeply loved. He also felt it right that she secure her own future, and that the best way for that to happen was for Antoinette and me to be lawfully bound in matrimony. So we agreed to a marriage neither of us wanted, one destined to be loveless.
I tried my best to do the right thing. But at times it all got to be too much. I felt a stranger in my own home and that my life was going nowhere. I dropped out of university without graduating and fled to wherever it was I could. France, Germany, Morocco,America—anywhere but England. This was a double-edged sword. During this time I saw the world and things I never thought I’d see, but still I was sickened by the things I’d done to have led me there, and I was lonelier than ever.
When Ada was born, Father begged me to come back. Believed she deserved one of her parents in her life. I, stubborn to the core, stayed away. His disapproval only heightened over time, and he wrote me out of my inheritance. Then one day I returned, hoping—but not knowing how—to care for the daughter I once abandoned.
What I have recently come to learn is that in the years following the early diagnosis of his terminal illness, my father chose to rewrite his will to secure my future once again. The copy you had seen in the album by my bedside is outdated, signed in the years I had left after Ada’s birth.
And another fact I should disclose to you, Bron. I told you that Antoinette and I were divorced, but by that I meant that we have lived our separate lives. I apologize here for my deceit. Now that my father has secured her with a comfortable sum of money, we have come to the shared conclusion that a divorce would indeed best suit us all. But we will never truly be separated from one another. We have also told Ada the truth of her parentage. This is what Giovanni, Toni, Father and I have been discussing over the last few months, and though it has pained me having them around, it was all ultimately for the best. As I am sure you are wondering, she is taking it as well as you’d expect of her, with a multitude of questions. She is always asking after you.
This, Bron, is as much as I can admit to you. I hope you will understand my motives up to now were not merely to be secretive to you, nor to push you away, but those of an undeserving father struggling with how to best admit to and live through the wrongs he has caused his family.
I hope you will think of me with less derision. I cannot lie and say that I didn’t feel hurt by your poorly plotted accusations, but I am sorry to have made a mockery of you if it played a hand in your decision to leave. You were ignorant of everything concerning our family setup, and it is only now that I can bring myself to reveal the truth behindit. I will continue to insist you think twice before accusing someone of committing a crime, but it is your charm and flights of fancy that so draw me to you, and I would not change you for the world. There is a spark in you that makes me feel things I haven’t felt in years.
Do come back to us when you are ready. We miss you very much. Ada wants her governess back. But above all, she misses her friend.
Yours faithfully, and ever true (that I promise, from this moment on),
Darcy
P.S. Please find enclosed herein the remainder of your wages, and a gift left to you by my father in his last will and testament. Do with it what you will. It shall not disappoint.
Attached to the letter is a check addressed to Bron, a check of a considerable amount of money, enough to rent a room for years, and more besides.
He spends several days with the letter tucked under his pillow, trying to read between the lines of what is there and what is not. He thinks about Giovanni and his broken heart, about Ada and her mother, about Toni’s decision to entrust her child with the father of a man who had wronged her. He thinks about Darcy’s path to committing so many wrongs, wrongs that harden so many people along the way and cause so much destruction in their wake.
Still, he doesn’t understand what really happened between them all. There are gaps in his knowledge, in the unfolding of events. But as part of his commitment to being less of a dreamer, and realizing he is tired, he stops. Puts it to rest. This isn’t his story to tell, nor his mystery to solve. Things are as they are, they happen as they happen, and one can only move on when given the chance.Do better.Mr. Edwards used the last years of his life trying to rectify his wrongs. To do right by his son and understand who he really was. For no matter whoDarcy said his father used to be, Mr. Edwards was to Bron an entirely different man, a man who welcomed him, embraced people’s differences.
He thinks then of his keeper, who has not been as successful at rectifying wrongs—a woman changed by the loss of her child, who is wanting of forgiveness but who hasn’t been given the chance to ask for it. Some questions may very well remain unanswered, but the last of his meddling is finally looking to be fruitful.
He receives an email from an admissions coordinator at the University of Oxford and is forwarded to Keble College’s alumni office, who explain that because of General Data Protection Regulation they are unable to share any personal data or information about any of their former students. However, attached to the email is a link that shares archived material of former year groups, should it be of use, and he finds Keble College’s graduating class. He trawls through the names to find the one he is looking for, but still there is no sign of anything more. He uses other students’ names to search for any mutuals, any other lead onto which he can jump. Combing through their friends’ lists and sliding into their DMs, he explains his reasons for reaching out.
At some point, he receives a reply that says,
With messages sent back and forth and contact details shared, he has finally reached the person he has hoped to. An inspiring conversation ensues, one that ends with:
Bron has the sudden urge to add another text message to Harry’s blank profile, to the wall of blue messages he has crafted over years. What if, on that day in Cambridge, it really had been Harry he’d seen?
And somehow, by some miracle, after a lethargic week of inactivity, his phone buzzes. It had been left on his bed; he is downstairs with Mrs. Flanders, losing a game of Connect Four. When he comes up to his bedroom, he finds that the blank profile is no longer blank. His last message signals “Read” and he is, for a long while, stunned. Crying. The wall of text is miraculously broken by a single reply:
He is sitting inside a café off the King’s Parade, his eye flitting between the large glass window and the door. To his left, the window allows him a view of the busy weekend bustle: King’s College ahead of him, the cyclists whizzing past, the tourists with their shopping bags, and the students doing who knows what they do with their free-from-their-studies Saturdays. There is a woman doing tai chi in the street.
He has scrubbed himself well: figuratively, in the sense that his nails have been buffed, his face serumed; literally, in the wayhe has loofahed away all the dead skin through his hot shower, and perhaps a layer or more so than that too. He fidgets with the bell sleeves of his blouse, tucks a stray hair behind his ear, and sips at the tea that’s been freshly brewed, though it is a little stronger than he usually takes it, glancing down at his phone screen, the message that simply reads,
But he has been waiting here for thirty minutes, having arrived twenty minutes early. The breath catches in his throat and he is thinking, again,I’m such an idiot. He’s not coming.He catches a glimpse of himself in the window; the way his hair is tied gives him an elfin appearance, and he scans the streetwalkers’ faces as they stroll past, smiles at a few of them. One even smiles back. He feels the nerves of his being seen.
And then he sees him, bobbing along with a backpack slung on one shoulder and headphones slipping from his ears and down to his neck. He turns his head to follow, but hears the ring of the café’s door opening, and rights his head again, sits up straighter. He fiddles with his thumbs and stares down at the table before glancing up again. He feels the heat at his side like a pressure.
“Hey, is that you, Bron?”
“Hi,” is about all he can manage. It gets stuck in his throat, and he thinks about standing up for a hug, but the backpack is dropped and the chair opposite scraped back, so he stays where he is, a table islanding between them. “It’s really me.”
Harry is taller than when he’d last seen him, though no higher than six feet, and fuller too. In the cheeks, but also in the way his muscle sculpts his clothes. He is wearing a hoodie, casual jogging bottoms, and Converse sneakers. Bron suddenly feels himself overdressed, like he has made too much effort with his appearance.
“Dang, dude, I almost wouldn’t recognize you. You look … amazing.” Harry is smiling at him, from ear to ear, and Bron can’t help but smile back.
