‘What does yours say?’ Noah broke the impasse, as direct as ever.
Liv suddenly smiled, a soft, sad smile that transformed her face. ‘Just that he loved me.’ She slid her letter across the table to Noah.
‘Same here.’ Chloe laid hers on the table as well.
Megan saw that each missive was extremely short – a date, their name and one line of writing. I love you. Goodbye, Dad x.
‘Is this it?’ Noah’s voice struck a discordant note. His frustration yet again drowning out the quieter emotions of the others.
Ms Hewson nodded. ‘His instruction was simply to give you these, once you’d arrived at a settlement.’
Megan couldn’t take her eyes off the loopy, shaky letters; the words looked as if they might slide off the page if you lifted up the paper. Despite their brevity, each letter must have taken him hours to write. One last huge effort at communication with his offspring. An effort appreciated by Chloe and Liv, but obviously not by Noah. What more did he want? A flash of anger ripped through her.
‘What else were you expecting, Noah? Is “this” not enough, for you? Confirmation that your father loved you. Loved all of you. Equally.’
As Megan was speaking, Liv drew all three letters towards her and lined them up. Laid out thus, it was even more obvious the pains Jonathan had taken to write each one. But there was something about the alertness in Liv’s body that seemed to signal more than just an emotional response to her father’s last message. ‘Ms Hewson, when did Dad give you these?’ Liv asked.
Ms Hewson replied, ‘Your father didn’t pass them to me himself. Miss Browne brought them into the office.’
‘But when? What date did she deliver them?’
The letters were all dated 12th November.
Ms Hewson tugged the front of her blouse straight, pointlessly – she already looked immaculately neat. ‘I’d have to check my calendar to be absolutely certain… but I think it was the week before he died.’
Liv had everyone’s attention now. ‘And you didn’t think it odd that the week before he died, he gave you letters to give out in the event of his death?’
Ms Hewson looked calm, but there was a slight increase in volume when she answered Liv. ‘No. I knew your father’s diagnosis was terminal. When Ms Browne brought the letters, I assumed that his health had, sadly, deteriorated further. It seemed – it still seems – wholly consistent with what I knew of his character and his wishes.’
‘But prescient, no?’
‘A little, perhaps.’ Another tug of her shirt.
Noah chipped in. ‘Liv, what are you getting at?’
‘I’m thinking it’s a bit of a coincidence that Dad wrote these letters and gave them to the solicitor’s just four days before he died.’
Chloe looked aghast. ‘You’re saying that he knew!’
‘Yes.’ Liv’s brain seemed to be going into overdrive, her expression reflecting an avalanche of thoughts. ‘Chloe, you said it yourself. He’d been better than he had been in months. The meds were helping. His breathing was fairly stable. It certainly was, the last time I saw him.’ Liv suddenly looked at Megan and a pulse of energy ripped through the room. ‘What do you make of it, Megan? When you went to bed that night, did you have any inkling it would be his last?’ When Megan didn’t respond, Liv asked again. ‘Well, did you?’
Megan knew her silence was damning, but she was choking on her own rush of thoughts and emotions. At last she managed a quiet but firm, ‘No.’
They all stared at her, waiting for more. She forced herself to speak.
‘No. He was obviously still very poorly, but no, I had no idea I was about to lose him. If I had, I would never have gone to bed.’ And slept through his death, leaving Lisa to be there for Jonathan at the very end. A fact that no one else in the room was aware of.
‘Are you saying he put all this in place,’ Noah waved his hand around the room, ‘the will, that mad Statement of Wishes thing, these letters, then – when it was all sorted – topped himself?’ Noah asked.
Ms Hewson’s polite ‘Please, this is all speculation’ went unheard.
Liv had momentum now. ‘Actually it’s not just possible – it’s likely. Think about what Dad was like about having control of things, of his life, of us.’ There was a pause as they did exactly that.
‘He wouldn’t,’ Chloe said.
‘He would,’ Liv replied. ‘And who could blame him, given what he was facing? It was only going to get worse, and it was already bad. I know he hated the thought of how he was going to end up. We talked about it once, soon after he was first diagnosed. The dependency, the lack of control horrified him.’
‘How?’ Noah asked.
‘What do you mean, “how”?’
‘If he did kill himself, how did he do it?’ Noah’s voice was flat, parched of emotion.
‘How the hell would I know?’ Liv flared.
‘Whoa. I’m not accusing you of anything. I was just asking.’
‘Stop it!’ Megan’s instruction landed hard in the middle of their speculation. They looked at her. She summoned up all the courage she could muster. ‘Have you learnt nothing from this weekend?’ She looked at each of them in turn. ‘What difference does it make? He’s gone. He provided for all of us. He played his part, right up until the end. One of his very last acts was to write to each of you, telling you how much he loved you. Why not be satisfied with that? Why not leave him in peace? Don’t you think he deserves that?’
There was the longest pause – during which Megan waited for the accusations and the venom to start up all over again, but they didn’t.
It was Chloe who finally spoke, calmly and kindly. ‘What do you really think happened that night, Megan?’
Megan would always wonder, but she now realised she no longer needed to know for certain. ‘I
