I spent more time preparing for the meeting than I needed to.<\/p>\n
I checked the letter again.<\/p>\n
I made sure the pages were together.<\/p>\n
I looked inside the tin, although I already knew what I had placed there.<\/p>\n
It wasn't that I thought something had changed.<\/p>\n
I was nervous.<\/p>\n
There was something uncomfortable about carrying a question from one person to another when the first person could no longer answer for herself.<\/p>\n
My mother had left me something.<\/p>\n
I was taking it to someone else.<\/p>\n
And I had no idea what that person might see in it.<\/p>\n
I kept telling myself that I was doing the sensible thing.<\/p>\n
If Carol knew something, she could tell me.<\/p>\n
If she didn't, I would have lost nothing by asking.<\/p>\n
That was how I justified the decision.<\/p>\n
It sounded convincing until I started thinking about what would happen if she did know something.<\/p>\n
What if she recognized the letter?<\/p>\n
What if she knew why my mother had kept it?<\/p>\n
What if she understood the meaning of something that had never made sense to me?<\/p>\n
I wasn't sure I was ready for those answers.<\/p>\n
But I went anyway.<\/p>\n
I had spent enough time sitting alone with questions that were getting me nowhere.<\/p>\n
I needed another person to look at what I had found.<\/p>\n
I needed to know whether the letter meant what I thought it meant or whether grief had made me read too much into it.<\/p>\n
By the time I arrived, I had rehearsed what I wanted to say.<\/p>\n
I would begin with the simplest facts.<\/p>\n
My mother had died.<\/p>\n
I had found something she left behind.<\/p>\n
I wanted Carol to read it.<\/p>\n
I would let her decide what to say after that.<\/p>\n
I didn't want to tell the story in a way that pushed her toward a particular answer.<\/p>\n
I wanted her honest reaction.<\/p>\n
At least, that was what I told myself.<\/p>\n
The truth was that I wanted her to reassure me.<\/p>\n
I wanted her to look at the letter and say that there was nothing to worry about.<\/p>\n
I wanted the questions to disappear.<\/p>\n
I wanted my mother's death to remain what I had thought it was: a loss, not the beginning of a mystery.<\/p>\n
I had no reason to believe that would happen.<\/p>\n
Still, I hoped.<\/p>\n
I brought the tin with me.<\/p>\n
It was an ordinary thing to carry, and yet I kept thinking about it as I made my way to the meeting.<\/p>\n
I had no idea whether it contained anything beyond the letter that mattered.<\/p>\n
I didn't know what my mother had expected me to do after reading it.<\/p>\n
I didn't know whether she had told Carol anything before she died.<\/p>\n
And I didn't know what Carol would think when she saw what I had brought.<\/p>\n
I had known Carol long enough to trust her with a difficult conversation.<\/p>\n
That didn't mean I knew everything about her.<\/p>\n
It didn't mean she knew everything about my mother.<\/p>\n
But I believed she might be able to help me understand what I had found.<\/p>\n
That belief was enough to get me through the door.<\/p>\n
We settled in.<\/p>\n
For a moment, the meeting felt ordinary.<\/p>\n
I had the tin with me.<\/p>\n
The letter was there.<\/p>\n
I could finally stop imagining how the conversation might go and begin having it.<\/p>\n
Then Carol looked at the container.<\/p>\n
She didn't immediately ask what it was.<\/p>\n
She didn't reach for it.<\/p>\n
She looked at me, then at the tin, as though the two things belonged together in a way I hadn't considered.<\/p>\n
I noticed the change.<\/p>\n
It was small, but I noticed it.<\/p>\n
There was a difference between looking at something unfamiliar and recognizing something you had hoped never to see again.<\/p>\n
I couldn't say which one I was watching.<\/p>\n
I only knew that Carol seemed to have a question ready before I had explained why I had come.<\/p>\n
That unsettled me.<\/p>\n
I had expected to begin the conversation.<\/p>\n
Instead, I found myself waiting for her to speak.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether I had made a mistake by bringing the tin.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether my mother had told Carol something that I had never been told.<\/p>\n
I wondered whether this meeting was going to be more difficult than I had prepared for.<\/p>\n
I could have put the container away.<\/p>\n
I could have told Carol that I had changed my mind and that we could talk another time.<\/p>\n
But that would have meant carrying the same questions home with me.<\/p>\n
I was tired of doing that.<\/p>\n
So I stayed where I was.<\/p>\n
I waited.<\/p>\n
Carol finally spoke.<\/p>\n
Her question was about my mother.<\/p>\n
Not about the letter.<\/p>\n
Not about what I had discovered.<\/p>\n
Not even about why I had come to see her.<\/p>\n
She wanted to know whether my mother had been the one who told me to bring the tin.<\/p>\n
I wasn't prepared for that.<\/p>\n
I had assumed Carol would need me to explain the circumstances.<\/p>\n
Instead, she seemed to be asking about an instruction that might have come from my mother.<\/p>\n
For a second, I didn't know how to respond.<\/p>\n
I thought about the letter.<\/p>\n
I thought about what I had been told and what I had not been told.<\/p>\n
I tried to remember whether there had been anything I could honestly describe as a direct instruction.<\/p>\n
There hadn't.<\/p>\n
My mother had left me a note.<\/p>\n
That was the answer I could give without pretending to know more than I did.<\/p>\n
I told Carol about it.<\/p>\n
I watched her while I spoke.<\/p>\n
I expected her to relax once she understood that I hadn't come because of some elaborate plan.<\/p>\n
She didn't.<\/p>\n
Instead, her attention remained fixed on the tin.<\/p>\n
That was when I began to understand that I might have brought her something she recognized.<\/p>\n
I didn't know what it was.<\/p>\n
I didn't know why it mattered.<\/p>\n
But I could no longer pretend that this was an ordinary visit.<\/p>\n
Carol had not asked about the tin because she was curious.<\/p>\n
She had asked because its presence meant something to her.<\/p>\n
I had come looking for answers.<\/p>\n
Now I was afraid of what those answers might be.<\/p>\n
I spent more time preparing for the meeting than I needed to. I checked the letter again. I made sure the pages were together. I looked inside the tin, although … <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":40123,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-40125","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-insightdrama"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40125","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=40125"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40125\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40145,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40125\/revisions\/40145"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/40123"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40125"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40125"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/insightdrama.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40125"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}