Chapter Text
She wrote the letter on a Wednesday afternoon in October.
She was sixty-eight years old. She lived, by then, in a small apartment in the seventh arrondissement of Paris, which she had bought outright with the proceeds of a memoir she had not particularly wanted to write but had been required to write by the terms of an agreement that had also resulted in her release from prison nine years earlier.
She had not enjoyed writing the memoir. She had enjoyed the apartment. The trade had, on balance, been acceptable.
The apartment had a window that looked out over a small courtyard with a chestnut tree in it. The chestnut tree, she had been told by the previous owner, was approximately one hundred and forty years old, which made it older than the apartment building, which had been built around the tree out of what the previous owner had described as architectural cowardice. Eva approved of the tree.
She did not approve of architectural cowardice in principle, but in this specific case she found the result good, and she had revised her position to permit exceptions for large old trees.
She sat at the small desk by the window. She had been told, three weeks earlier, that a probe was being prepared.
The probe would carry information, scientific updates, photographs, and news. The probe would also carry, she had been informed, personal correspondence if it came from individuals on a small, approved list whose connection to the resident of the 40 Eridani system was considered diplomatically appropriate to acknowledge.
She was on the list. She was the second name on the list. She had asked who the first name was, and she had been told it was the principal of Ryland Grace's former middle school, who was organizing a class letter project. She had laughed. She had laughed for some minutes. The official who had been delivering the information had been politely confused. Eva had not explained.
Now she sat at the desk. She had a sheet of paper. She had a fountain pen, which her doctor had recommended for the arthritis in her writing hand. She had nothing else to do this afternoon. She had several afternoons available in the coming weeks, if this afternoon proved insufficient.
She thought about what to write.
She thought about it for a long time.
She first made a list on a separate sheet of paper of the things she could include in the letter. The list, when she finished it, ran to forty-seven items.
They ranged from the personal (a detailed account of the last time she had touched him) to the operational (a summary of the years following the mission's success) to the political (an honest account of her trial and imprisonment, which Grace would not have heard about) to the trivial (an observation that she had finally finished Anna Karenina, and that on a third reading she had revised her opinion of Anna slightly, although not entirely, and that she felt he would have wanted to know this).
She looked at the list. She read it three times.
Then she took a red pen and crossed out forty-three of the items.
The four items that remained were:
- He had been an unexpected courtesy in a series of necessary cruelties.
- The world had not ended.
- She had thought about him.
- She hoped he was warm.
She looked at the four items. She rearranged them. She added some connective tissue. She wrote a draft. She read the draft. She did not like the draft. She wrote a second draft. She read the second draft. She did not like the second draft either, but she liked it better than the first.
She wrote a third draft. She did not particularly like the third draft, but she had stopped expecting to like any of the drafts, and the third draft contained the four things she had wanted to say, and it contained no things she did not want to say, and that was the threshold she had set for herself, and so the third draft was the one she sent.
She thought, afterward, about what she had not written.
She had not written about the cell. She had not written about the forty memories. She had not written about the hot water pipe that clanked at three in the morning, or about the seventeen women in the yard, or about the small library she had built out of his quirks.
These were not things he needed to know. These were things she had needed during the period when she needed them. The need had passed. The memories remained. They did not require transmission to remain real.
She had not written about the trial. The trial had been long and ugly and had involved, at one point, an aggressive cross-examination by a junior prosecutor who had wanted to make his career on her conviction and had largely succeeded.
She had been convicted on three of the seven counts. She had served eleven years of a fifteen-year sentence. She had been released on the strength of a campaign she had not solicited, organized by a coalition of scientists and former diplomats and one extremely persistent journalist from Le Monde, who had argued, with what she still considered surprising clarity, that the world had not ended specifically because Eva Stratt had done what Eva Stratt had done.
The court had eventually agreed, partially. She had accepted the partial agreement.
Grace did not need to know any of this. Grace had known her at the height of her powers. Grace should remember her at the height of her powers, and not at the height of her powerlessness, which was a different height and not one she had any pride about.
She had not written about the photograph.
She had a small photograph of him, taken from his NASA personnel file, which she had requisitioned for unauthorized personal purposes during the project and had never returned.
The photograph showed him at thirty-eight, looking mildly alarmed at the camera, his hair slightly too long on one side, his collar slightly crooked.
She had kept the photograph on her desk for thirty years. She had taken it into the cell, where it was confiscated and returned only upon her release.
She now kept it on the desk by the window. It was visible in her peripheral vision as she wrote the letter. It would have been, in some sense, easier to write the letter if she had been able to look at the photograph more directly, but she had found that direct looking was not, in this case, helpful, and she had kept her eyes on the paper.
She had not written about the photograph because the photograph was hers. The photograph belonged to the part of him that she had been allowed to keep. She did not have many things from him.
She had the photograph, the memory of his hand sloshing coffee onto a bench, the small library of his quirks, and the four sentences she had committed to the letter. The photograph was not for him.
The photograph was for her, and she was not going to give it to him by mentioning it, even now, even at sixty-eight, even when there was no further harm that the giving could do.
Some things were yours. Some things stayed yours. This was something she had learned over the years in the cell and had been refining ever since.
She finished the letter at four in the afternoon. She read it one more time. She signed it.
She did not sign it Stratt. She did not sign it Eva Stratt. She did not sign it Dr. Stratt, Director Stratt, or any of the other titles she had accumulated and shed over the course of her life.
She signed it simply, Eva.
She had only ever been Eva, to him, once. On the night before the launch. She had been Eva for less than ten seconds of her entire acquaintance with him. But she had been Eva for those ten seconds, and she was Eva for the letter, and she would be Eva for whatever quiet space of mind he kept her in during the years that the letter would take to reach him.
She folded the letter. She placed it in the envelope. She sealed the envelope. She set the envelope on the corner of the desk, where she would not forget about it in the morning.
She looked, then, at the photograph. She looked at it for a long time.
She put her hand on her own sternum, for a moment. She had not done this in a long time. The gesture had felt, in the cell, like a necessary substitution, and in the years after the cell, it had felt like a luxury, and at some point, it had simply faded out of her practice in the way that small private rituals fade when they are no longer needed.
She did it now. It felt the same as it had always felt. It felt warm.
She thought, briefly: I hope this reaches you. I hope it reaches you while there is still enough of you to read it. I hope it reaches you on a quiet afternoon. I hope you are sitting somewhere warm, with your alien, doing the work, and that the letter does not interrupt anything important. I hope you will read it twice. I hope the second reading will be the one that you remember.
She did not write any of this down. It was not necessary to write any of this down. It was enough that she had thought it.
She turned off the lamp on the desk. She went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea. The chestnut tree outside the window was beginning to drop its leaves; the courtyard, in the gathering dusk, was a small, still pool of yellow and brown. She stood at the window with the tea in her hands and watched a single leaf fall, very slowly, in the long zigzag way that chestnut leaves fall.
She thought about him.