The Man Who Can't Let Go novel · Chapter 11 of 24

Chapter 11: Less Slant

Tobias crossed the study and knelt on the carpet beside her.

He didn't touch the notebook.

He held out the cream letter instead, unfolded, in a hand that wasn't steady.

"Read it," he said. "Tell me it's yours."

Virginia took it from him.

She read the three lines of her own name, her own handwriting, her own loop on the last letter.

Then she opened the notebook to the last page and laid the two side by side on the carpet under the lamp.

The words were the same, down to the comma.

"It looks like mine," she said. "Of course it does. She spent three months on it."

"It looks exactly like yours."

"Look at the t," she said. "Her t. She crosses it left to right, and low. Mine goes high."

He looked.

She watched his face change as the whole thing came together, slowly.

"It starts with Tobias," he said, very quietly. "You never wrote Tobias. Not once. You wrote Tobe."

"I know."

"I noticed it tonight, and I didn't know what to do with it."

"You noticed it," she said, "and you kept the ring on."

Tobias sat back on his heels.

"I read this every night for three years," he said. "I knew your handwriting better than I know my own."

"I said to myself, she wrote it, I have to let her go. And I never could. I thought something was wrong with me."

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