Anna sat down slowly.
“I think she finally wanted you to know why I left.”
“You told me why.”
“I told you what your mother made me believe I had to say.”
I stared at her.
“Ruth came to my apartment after you proposed. She was wearing that gray coat with the fur collar.”
I remembered the coat. My mother wore it to church.
“She told me I wasn’t the kind of woman you should marry. She said my family would hold you back.”
“Anna—”
“Please let me finish. I’ve spent a long time wondering how to say this to you.”
I closed my mouth.
Her father had been struggling to keep his job. Her parents were behind on bills. Ruth knew people who could make their situation worse, and she had made sure Anna understood that.
She had threatened her father’s livelihood. Then she had threatened to spread stories about Anna’s sister, who was about to be married.
“I told her you wouldn’t let her do those things,” Anna said. “She asked how I thought you would stop her once you were gone.”
“My mother wouldn’t…”
The sentence died halfway out.
Ruth had taught Sunday school for forty years. She organized meals for sick neighbors. At her funeral, people had lined up to tell me how generous she was.
But I remembered other things, too. People lowering their voices when she entered a room. Her certainty that she knew what was best. The way disagreement could become disloyalty in her hands.
“Everyone listened to her,” Anna said. “I was twenty, Walter. My family couldn’t afford for her to be angry with us.”
I looked at the untouched coffee.
“So you wrote the letter.”
She nodded. “And you left.”
“Because you asked me to.”
“I know.”
We sat with that for a while.
Finally, I asked whether she’d married.
“No.”
“Was there anyone after me?”
“There were people I cared about. It never became that kind of life.”
I wanted to apologize, although I didn’t yet know what an apology from me could change.
“You could have told me later,” I said. “Once I was settled. Once you were away from her.”
Anna pressed her hands together.
“I did try to reach you.”
“When?”
“Three weeks after I sent the letter. I found out I was pregnant.”
PART 4: The Other Person in the House
For several seconds, I couldn’t hear anything beyond the refrigerator humming behind her.
