Chapter 20

CHAPTER 5 — BOOK II

 

Letters

 

(Late October–November 2001, Sydney)

 

The letters arrived later.

 

Not together. Not dramatically.

 

One came first, addressed in a hand Geoffrey did not recognise. Texas postmark. Heavy paper. Conservative stamp.

 

Awan opened it at the kitchen counter, glanced once, then passed it to Geoffrey without comment.

 

It was brief.

 

Elaine’s mother wrote carefully, as if the words themselves required supervision. She spoke of shock. Of sorrow. Of how unimaginable it all was. She wrote that Elaine had always been strong, and that George had seemed kind. She wrote that distance did not erase love.

 

She did not write we are sorry.

 

She did not write we were wrong.

 

The letter ended with a sentence that lingered longer than it should have:

 

“The world feels very unsafe now.”

 

Geoffrey folded the letter neatly and placed it back in the envelope.

 

He did not feel angry.

 

He felt confirmed.

 

No reply was sent.

 

The second letter arrived weeks later, misdirected at first, then forwarded.

 

California.

 

The handwriting was unfamiliar but unguarded.

 

There was no salutation beyond Geoffrey’s name.

 

I don’t know if this will reach you.
I hope it does.

 

Alejandro Luis Mendoza Rivera did not explain who he was.

 

He did not need to.

 

Your mother was a good woman.
She chose her life with care.
I hope you know that.

 

He wrote nothing of himself. Nothing of loss. Nothing of history.

 

Only this:

 

I wanted you to know that there are people in the world who loved her without needing anything in return.
I was one of them.

 

The letter ended there.

 

No address.
No request for response.

 

Geoffrey read it once, then again.

 

He did not cry.

 

He folded it carefully and placed it somewhere safe.

 

Years later, he would realise this was the moment he learned something essential about love—that it did not always demand continuity, or recognition, or even presence.

 

Sometimes it only asked to be true.

 

The letter arrived folded twice, then once more.

In the margin, beside a paragraph that mattered, Embong had written a word Geoffrey recognised instantly—the same one he had circled years earlier. This time spelt correctly.

Below it, in smaller writing:

Context matters.

Geoffrey laughed aloud once, then stopped himself.

 

In the weeks that followed, the language outside sharpened.

 

At school, lines were drawn that no one claimed to have drawn.
Words like security and normal were used as if they were interchangeable.

 

Once, Geoffrey heard someone say, “You just can’t trust people anymore.”

 

Someone else nodded.

 

Embong said nothing.

 

Neither did Geoffrey.

 

That silence felt familiar.

 

It was the silence Elaine had mastered long before she ever left Texas—the silence that refused to become complicit.

 

At home, Awan watched the news less. Delima more. Not out of fear, but vigilance.

 

“They will talk themselves into cruelty,” she said once, turning the television off. “And call it realism.”

 

No one disagreed.

 

Geoffrey never spoke to Embong about the letters.

 

He did not need to.

 

What mattered was already visible in the way Embong moved through rooms, unshrinking. In the way Awan positioned himself at doorways. In the way Delima adjusted the world without announcing she was doing so.

 

Elaine had done the same.

 

Not loudly.
Not bitterly.

 

She had simply refused to live where love came with conditions.

 

Geoffrey understood now that this refusal was not loss.

 

It was inheritance.

 

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