Iria kept Milo’s letter in her pocket until the attic was empty. Pella had gone downstairs with her copies, and Celandine was still locking the shop. I stayed by the table, putting my mother’s papers into the order I’d found them. The cabinet door remained open behind me.
“You can go,” Iria said.
“I know.” I lined up the repair slips by date. “I’m not waiting for you to tell me what you write.”
She took the letter from her pocket and smoothed the crease Milo had made. “I thought you might want to know whether I answer.”
“I do. I don’t need to know what you say.”
Her thumb moved across his signature. I could see the question she was weighing, though she didn’t ask it. Whether I’d mind that she had a history with Milo from before he and I had ever written to each other. Whether the two of us had made a place she was now entering.
I shut the cabinet drawer. “He can be yours to write to. I won’t read over your shoulder.”
“I don’t want to take anything from you.”
“You’re not.” I touched the notebook’s worn cover. “He made his own answer. You get to make yours.”
Iria held the letter against her coat. “I don’t know if I can tell him everything.”
“Then don’t.”
She looked at me then, not searching my face for permission. “You make it sound simple.”
“It’s a sheet of paper. You can stop when you reach the edge.”
A short sound escaped her, almost a laugh. She set the letter down and pulled a clean page from the stack. I took the notebook and moved to the far end of the table, where I could copy my mother’s cabinet labels without watching Iria write.
The first thing she put down was Milo’s name. She crossed it out, then wrote it again, more carefully. The pencil paused there. I kept my attention on the labels. My mother’s handwriting stayed steady even on the entries she had made in a hurry. She had made room in her records for the name Iria chose. She had made room for a question she couldn’t answer herself.
Iria shifted the paper closer to the lamp. “Nessa?”
I looked up.
“If I tell him the truth, I don’t want you to think I’m saying he should have done something differently.”
“I won’t.”
“I’m not sure I can explain it without sounding as if I wanted him to feel guilty.”
“Then tell him what you were afraid of. He can decide what it means.”
Next
Iria has finally named what she feared in the basement, but the next part of her story—the person and life she left behind—still waits in her mother’s unfinished records.
She lowered her pencil. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”
I turned back to the labels. The question belonged to her now. I could leave it there.
### Milo
I was at the records-office table when Iria’s letter arrived. The stamped form Pella had made me keep sat beneath my elbow, a little square of proof that the city had written my name down. I had been checking it against my own copy when the envelope slid into the mailbox.
Her handwriting was careful, with the letters spaced farther apart than in her first note. I carried the page to the chair by the basement window. It took me a while to open it.
*You asked what I was afraid of.*
The next line had been rubbed thin where she’d erased something. She had written again beneath it.
*I was afraid you would ask me to stay. I wanted you to. That was the part I couldn’t say. The door was already there, and I had seen what it could do with a person’s want. I thought if I stayed beside you, it would find a way to make you follow me. I didn’t know if that was true. I couldn’t risk finding out.*
She had signed her name, then added a final sentence beneath it.
*I’m sorry I left you with a warning instead of an answer.*
I read it twice. The first time, I remembered her at the worktable, watching the door behind her while I pretended not to notice. The second time, I remembered how close I’d come to asking her to stay.
There was no version of that room where I’d been owed an explanation. Still, I had wanted one. I had wanted her to choose to tell me, and I had been too young to understand that wanting wasn’t a claim.
I took the envelope from my pocket and laid it beside her letter. Nessa’s handwriting was on the address, but Iria had made the words inside her own. That mattered. I wrote my reply without crossing out the first line.
*I did want you to stay.*
I stopped there, then added:
*I don’t think you could have kept me safe by explaining more. I’m sorry the door made you choose between leaving me confused and making me a reason to come after you. I can’t tell you what would have happened if you’d stayed. I’m glad you’re alive to tell me what you remember.*
The last sentence sat too close to a question. I considered removing it. Instead, I left it. She could answer or not.
I signed my name and put the letter in the mailbox. I did not ask the room to give her back to me. I had learned how easily a wish could become a direction.
### Nessa
Iria was still by the attic window when Milo’s reply came. She had put her first letter away, but this one she opened at the table. I stayed with the cabinet inventory until she finished reading.
“He wanted me to stay,” she said.
My pencil stopped above the page. I set it down. “He says he doesn’t think you could have kept him safe by explaining more.”
“I know what he says.” Her finger rested beside the sentence. “I’m trying to hear it without turning it into another thing I have to carry.”
I moved the inventory aside. “You don’t owe him a reply tonight.”
“He didn’t ask for one.”
“No.”
She folded his letter along its old crease, then changed her mind and opened it again. The paper kept a faint ridge from the fold. She held the page by its corners, careful not to wear the words away.
“I thought he’d remember me as the person who frightened him,” she said. “Or as someone he needed to forgive.”
“He seems to remember you as someone he wanted to stay.”
Iria’s mouth pressed into a line. She glanced toward the mailbox, then turned back to the letter. “That’s harder.”
I understood more than I wanted to. Milo and I had spent years learning what we could ask of each other without making an answer into a debt. It had taken us too long to learn that love didn’t give either of us the right to decide the other person’s risk. Iria had made her choice in a room with a door that had already learned to use what people wanted. I couldn’t measure it from here.
I gathered my mother’s papers and stacked them in the cabinet. The old notebook still lay open to her entry about Iria’s return. My mother had written down that Iria asked whether the boy had answered, and that she left before she could be asked what she wanted. Beside it, in the margin, she had added a small question mark. My mother had not known the answer then. She had left space for it.
“I can make tea,” I said.
“Maybe in a minute.” Iria kept Milo’s letter open on the table. “I want to write again. I don’t know what to say yet.”
“You don’t have to know before you sit down.”
She picked up the pencil and turned it once between her fingers. “You always tell me to start with what I know.”
“It’s usually all I have.”
This time her smile reached her mouth. She rested the pencil against the paper and wrote one line. Then she covered it with her hand before I could read it.
I took the last bundle of records to the cabinet and closed the drawer. When I turned back, Iria had folded the new page inward, keeping the words to herself. She hadn’t sent it. She hadn’t hidden it, either.
For now, that was enough. She was no longer answering the passage’s version of what Milo wanted. She was deciding what she wanted him to know.