The Correspondent by Evans Virginia

Author:Evans,Virginia
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-593-79843-0
Publisher: Crown
Published: 2025-05-06T00:00:00+00:00

Rosalie Van Antwerp

33 Orange Lane

Goshen, CT 06756

June 5, 2017

Hello, Rosalie. I am writing because I know Paul’s surgery is Friday. I hope you have prepared well in advance, and have some kind of assistance with care lined up. To answer your questions, Harry has left, I have not heard from the DNA relation in Scotland, and things are going along fine with Mick Watts. I am reading To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf.

And lastly, you asked if everything is all right. No, everything is not all right. I cannot quite manage to move past the fact that you, my best friend, the person I held dearest to myself, would betray me by hosting my own daughter, who, as you very well know, I see once a year if I am lucky, and keep it from me. How humiliating, that you and she should see fit to need to conduct clandestine meetings. How wonderful it must be for you to have such a strong bond with Fiona, such an intimate, confiding relationship. I cannot imagine such a pleasure, but it sounds WONDERFUL. I just relish the thought of her cozying up in your den telling you all the ways in which I have failed her as a mother, and how glad she is to have a surrogate in you. I hate to think how bereft she would be if not for you, Rosalie.

You and I have enjoyed an honest, confrontational friendship for going on sixty years, and I cherished it. Good luck with Paul next week. In all hope, it’ll go smoothly for him.

Sybil

Postscript: For your information, before the letter in which you confessed to your little surprise reunion behind my back I was unaware of Fiona’s troubles with infertility and miscarriages, so thank you for providing me with that information.

Sybil Van Antwerp Stone

17 Farney Road

Arnold

MD 21012

United States of America

11 June 2017

Greetings, Sybil,

I received your letter from January at the end of April. The letter went to an old address, then it seems it went round and round never finding its way and finally it did come to me all bent and rumpled as if it’d been shoved someplace. I kept the letter to myself for several days and read it repeatedly, so many times the paper began to soften, stunned so I was. When I started with Kindred it was to trace familial lines of my father, an American, about whom I have very little knowledge, and when they began the DNA testing it was offered to me free of charge, so I did it rather without much thought, I’m somewhat embarrassed to say, seems a bit foolish, doesn’t it? And anyway, shortly after it I was going through some bills and trying to tidy up and cut back (I’d really already got as much information as I could about my paternal lineage), so I printed out the family history I’d found and closed the account. Hadn’t given Kindred a thought again until I read your letter.

I am a botanist, familiar with DNA.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.