Am also including some recipes from mother’s diet book. Dreading how you are cooking for yourself there. You are very pretty if you only take care of yourself, and I don’t think you’re much aware of that.

Loving you, Victoria

It’s a revelation in its mundanities. Here is evidence that Anais really lived, that she had a pet, that she sat in her dormitory and read this letter, smudged it with her fingerprints. There they are, greasy in the corners. There is no biography that can compare to this, to reading Anais and touching what she touched.

Esther looks around the room, fervid, then presses her fingertips to Anais’s gray fingerprints. Anais is alone in her dormitory, hearing the faint, ghosted voices of other people talking down the hall. It’s snowing outside. Her pointed shoulders are pulled up around her ears against the cold, and Esther is touching just her fingers, warming them.

* * *

When Esther was fourteen, she told herself this story: Anais Casey writes in a large stone apartment. The building is gray, historic, somewhere between an academic hall and a castle, ivy lying over it like the tentacles of a Gothic, grasping beast. Esther sees Anais, initially, through the window, a flash of her very black hair, the sleeve of her white dress. Maybe Esther is sitting in a tree outside, romantic, or in the building opposite, likewise trapped. Anais comes to the window. Her face is a pale mirror, curious and inviting.

In Anais’s little room, they sit together on the bed. The rest of the house is far away, like Anais lives in the hand of a thrust-out arm. A fine layer of dust has settled over the room, and it seems to Esther like no one ever comes here, and even Anais moves only enough to cause regular, quiet weather patterns in the accumulating dirt. There is maybe a faded tapestry or a wooden carving hung on one wall. It isn’t an ugly room; Esther would never consign her to ugliness.

They don’t talk much. What would Esther say? She only opens her book with its silver tree embossed on the cover, turns to the story that is called, like the book, “Housecat, Wildcat.”

“I wrote this when I was very young,” Anais says, touching the page like it’s the face of someone she loves. That is how Esther touches that page.

“I understood it,” Esther says. She is clumsy even in her own fantasies. She struggles with the words. “I understood what you were saying about them.” The word lesbian feels like it would embarrass them both, but Esther tries for it. She should want to say it to Anais, say the thing Anais could not write down about herself. Esther says, “They’re in love,” because it feels more grateful than calling all of them what they are.

She stops herself short of explaining Anais’s own story to her. She is already so in the habit of explaining.

Anais says, “That’s right.” She doesn’t look particularly proud or surprised. But she lifts her hand from the page and lets it fall lightly on Esther’s upper arm. She has long, fine hands with bones that jut at the knuckles, ink stains on her fingertips, nails trimmed in neat crescents. Esther lends her warmth and delicate calluses.