I have been thinking of your last story without stop since I read it. Between you and it, that is a lot of my mind you have occupied. I think the last story was like an egg. That is not a metaphor I’m going to explain to you. I am trying my hand at them now too, and if you can tell me how it was like an egg and you are right, then maybe I will tell you more of what I thought of it.

I also want you to know that you were very beautiful the last time I saw you. The silver in your hair is more becoming than you think it is, but more than that, I don’t think you know how well you have made yourself from yourself. I think you would be much happier if you knew how clearly I am able to see you. Sometimes I feel it is just me who really knows you.

With love, E

So, there is that.

Esther reads this letter three times, and she doesn’t know what it makes her feel, only that it opens a hole in her lung with bright rims like burning paper. She thinks of Gertrude, who might have the rest of these letters. Or an address at which Emilia can be contacted. She tries to imagine a letter she could write that Anais would ever want her daughter to read.

If Esther saw Anais Casey walking down the street—walking down the street, holding hands with her daughter—she would not know her. There is a fair, dark-haired woman who wrote books directly to Esther, and there is Anais Casey. There is Anais Casey, who may have loved her husband, who may have loved this woman, who may have loved neither of them or both. But who said that she did not want this definition Esther has, for years, draped over her. If she is to be believed, if her writing is to be believed.

Esther listened to a recording of Anais reading one of her own stories once, just one scratchy recording. She had to turn it off because she did not recognize the voice and hated it.

She pictures Emilia Obel with reddish-brown hair and a quick smile and then as a thin, worrying housewife with a pen between her fingers. A disembodied hand, almost, but capable of love.

This is how Esther feels, disembodied. Without body, without a place within herself to return to.

Cora was in part correct and the biographers who responded to Esther’s emails were correct. Both of them. That the best outcome is not knowing because that is the only outcome; there is only not to know.

Ester cannot know Anais—she is not hers.