I Was Always Second. Until I Left. novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Fifteen Letters

With her cards frozen and her flat locked, Gillian follows Malcolm home. The first letter tells her to sign nothing.

I did not get into the car right away.

I stood on the sidewalk in a wine-soaked wedding gown, looking at a box of envelopes with my name on them.

"I don't know you," I said.

"No," Malcolm agreed. "But I knew your mother."

He said it plainly, without any weight.

Behind me the front door of my family's house banged open, and Chandler's voice carried down the steps.

"Gillian! Get back here!"

I looked at Malcolm, and at the open car door.

I had a dress, a phone, and nowhere that wasn't owned by the people shouting my name.

I got in.

Malcolm laid the gown's long skirt across the back seat before he shut the door, so it wouldn't catch.

It was such a small thing that I almost cried, and I hated that.

He drove for ten minutes without talking.

I used the time to call my bank.

The woman on the line said my cards had been reported stolen at 1:42 that afternoon, by a family member on the account.

I hung up and called the property manager for my apartment.

My key fob had been deactivated.

The lease belonged to Whitman Wine Group, he said, and he was sorry, but he'd had an email from the office.

"Frozen at 1:42," I said out loud. "Forty minutes before the wedding."

"Your brother's idea of a head start," Malcolm said.

"You can't know that."

"Your father's assistant sent me a message at 1:50 that said you wouldn't be needing anything from my side after today." He kept his eyes on the road. "That's how I knew to come to the house."

"Your side of what?"

"I'll get to it."

"You'll get to it now," I said. "I'm sitting in a car with a stranger and I'm wearing a crime scene."

His mouth moved, barely.

"That's fair," he said. "Let me at least get you out of the dress first."

I stared at him.

"Out of the dress," he repeated, a beat too late, and a dark flush climbed his neck. "To change. I've got shirts. I didn't mean it like that."

It was the first time all day that I wanted to laugh.

We crossed the bridge into Sausalito, and he pulled up at a narrow house built into a hillside above the water.

It had a long deck, a lot of glass, and a yard full of herbs that somebody actually took care of.

"I'm not a murderer," he said as he unlocked the door. "I'm a vintner. It's usually less exciting."

Inside there was a kitchen with a scarred table, and a dog bed with no dog in it, and shelves of bottles with hand-lettered labels.

He gave me a grey sweatshirt and a pair of drawstring pants, and pointed at a bathroom.

I stood in front of the mirror for a long time.

The gown came off over my head, heavy and cold, and I laid it on the tile.

In the sweatshirt I looked like a woman who had walked out of her own life with nothing.

When I came out, he had set two mugs of tea on the kitchen table and put the wooden box between them.

"Fifteen letters," he said. "One on every birthday since your mother died. I wrote them. Your father sent them all back."

I picked one up from the top of the pile.

The stamp across the front said RETURN TO SENDER in thick black ink.

It was my father's handwriting.

I knew it from every permission slip I had ever had signed.

"Why would he do that?" I asked.

"I think you know a part of why."

"I don't."

Malcolm was quiet for a moment.

"Then I'd rather you didn't hear it from me tonight, with your brother's wine still drying on your hands," he said. "I'd rather you hear it from her."

"From who?"

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, which hung on a chair, and took out a cream-colored envelope that was thicker than the others.

It wasn't stamped or returned.

It had a single word on the front, in a hand I hadn't seen in fifteen years.

Gillian.

My whole body went still.

My mother's writing used to be on the notes in my lunch box.

I could not make myself touch it.

"She gave this to me eleven days before she died," Malcolm said. "She told me to hold it until the day you left your father's house on your own two feet."

"I didn't leave. They pushed me out."

"You walked out in front of two hundred people with wine down your front, and told them no," he said. "I think that counts."

I took the envelope.

My hands weren't steady, so I put it down on the table and opened it flat.

The paper smelled faintly of cedar.

There were only a few lines.

My dearest Gillian,

If you are reading this, they have made you the second one again, and you have finally left.

I'm proud of you. Now listen, because I may not have long to say it.

Sign nothing they hand you before you are twenty-eight.

Not one page.

Not for your father, not for a husband, not for love.

Go to Malcolm.

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