It was the kind of morning that arrives without apology — pale and certain, pressing its cold light through curtains that had grown thin from years of resisting it. She lay still for a moment, listening to the particular silence of a house that has only ever known one occupant.
The clock on the mantle had stopped, as it always did in winter, and she had long since stopped winding it. Time, she had decided, was a matter of willingness. One could choose to be inside it, or one could let it pass around one like a river around a standing stone.
She rose. The floorboards announced her, as they always did, each plank a distinct note in the morning's quiet score. The kettle was where she had left it, the window was where it had always been, and beyond the window the garden waited with its usual patient indifference.
The letter had arrived three days ago. She had placed it, unopened, in the drawer where she kept things she was not yet ready to face: an old photograph, a receipt for something she no longer remembered buying, a folded note in handwriting she recognised too well.
She poured the water. She watched the steam rise and disperse and become nothing. Outside, a bird she could not name landed on the garden wall, regarded the world with one bright eye, and departed.
There is a kind of knowing that precedes understanding — a certainty of the body before the mind has caught up with it. She had this knowing now, standing at the window with her tea going cold.
She set down the cup. She crossed to the drawer. She took out the letter.
The handwriting on the envelope was not his — it was a stranger's, careful and official — but the name written there was hers, rendered in full, in a form that no one had used since her mother was alive. It made her feel briefly, strangely young.
She did not open it then, either. She put it in the pocket of her cardigan and went out into the garden, where the frost had made a precise record of everything that had been still enough during the night to receive it. Each blade of grass, each bare twig, each spider's thread: a perfect catalogue of stillness, rendered in white.
She walked the perimeter, as she did most mornings. The garden was not large, but she had learned to walk it slowly. There was always something she had not noticed before — a new angle of light, a volunteer plant pushing up through the gravel, a stone that had moved in the night by means she preferred not to examine too closely.
The letter stayed in her pocket. She could feel its particular weight as she walked.
By the time she completed her circuit and returned to the back door, she had made a decision — not about the letter, not yet, but about the day. She would not spend it waiting. She would not, as she had sometimes done before, allow the unread thing to take up all the room.
She went inside. She put the kettle on again. She sat down at the table where the light was best and, finally, she opened it.