That’s what Agent Tirmizi told me when I asked her whether I could write to you. She reminded me, in stark terms, that I have caused a great deal of difficulty in your life, difficulty you were not able to prepare for or decide for yourself. She has warned me that all this means you might have reason not to keep a letter from me private, that you might have reason to sell a letter I send to you. Knowing you as I do, I don’t believe this is a great risk, but if it is—if it is a mistake, Meg, it is a mistake I won’t regret making. It is a mistake for which I would deserve the consequences, and if this letter shows up on some website tomorrow, or the next day, or any day after that, I hope you know I would not blame you.

Whatever it is that I deserve, what is more important is that you deserve to know about the many mistakes I have made over these last several months. As I am sure Agent Tirmizi will mention to you, I have been quite isolated since Friday, and while I have spent a great deal of my time answering and re-answering questions, I have also had a great deal of time to think about those mistakes. I enumerate them. I work them out like equations. I work backward through each step. I try to see all the places I went wrong.

I suppose the first and worst one is that I came to the shop this spring to see you, which has, to my profound regret, exposed you to this scandal in ways that, as I hope this letter will make clear, I was foolishly, selfishly unprepared for. That evening, I knew, from the second I walked through the door of the shop, that I would be withholding something from you, because I knew I could not tell you the full story of what I had seen in your letters. Everything I have told you about Avery and me was true: I did disappoint her. I was quiet and overly reserved, sometimes too blunt, and as a guest at the many social commitments that were important to her, I never could quite master the kind of social interaction that she needed in a partner. As I told you that day in the park, we each had our reasons for attempting the relationship, and we each had our reasons for knowing it wasn’t working. The letters in your program confirmed what I always knew.