Lily read it aloud. The letter was from her father, Thomas. He had written it in 1943 from a ship called the SS Avonmore, somewhere off the coast of Iceland. He wrote carefully, as men do when they know a letter might be the last one. He wrote about the cold, and the stars, and the way the sea looked at night when it was calm—like hammered slate, he said. He wrote to Ruth, Edna’s mother. He wrote that he had made her a rope.
“I have woven it from the best fibres I could find,” Lily read, her voice steady but careful. “Every strand I worked in thinking of you. When I am home, we will use it for the garden. I imagine the sweet peas climbing it in summer. I imagine you standing in the morning light, tending them. Keep it for me. Keep it until I come back.”
Edna said nothing for a long moment. She looked at the rope, coiled there on the kitchen table between the croissant bag and the teapot. “She kept it,” she whispered. “All those years. She kept it, and never said a word.”
