Morag Reyburn squared the will’s corners against her desk, twice, which was how I knew that whatever came next had already ruined at least one of our afternoons.
“There’s a codicil,” she said, in the voice of a woman who had read it to herself three times before accepting that it was not a clerical error. “I’d like to read it as written, if you don’t mind. Giulia was specific about the wording.”
I minded already. Across the narrow table Mateo had gone very still, the stillness he used to fold himself into before difficult calls with his mother, both hands flat on his knees like a man holding a chair down in wind. I had not seen him do it in three years. My body recognised it before my mind caught up to what it meant, which felt like a small betrayal committed by my own nervous system at ten past eleven on a Tuesday in the last week of September.
“Go on,” he said.
Morag put on her reading glasses, which she did not need for the page in front of her — I had watched her read three other documents that morning without them — and I understood that she was giving herself a beat before she had to look either of us in the eye.
“‘To Elodie Basile and Mateo Arrieta, jointly and without division,’” she read, “‘I leave the manuscript of my last novel, on the following condition. It is to be translated into English and into Spanish by the two of you, and by no one else, working from the same pages, in the same room, within six months of my death. If this condition is not met in full, the manuscript reverts to the Ferro Literary Trust, unpublished, in perpetuity, in any language.’”
She looked up. “There’s more.”
“There’s more,” I repeated, because it seemed important to say something before my face did something involuntary.
“‘I know exactly what I am asking. I have thought about it for longer than either of you would like to know, and I am not sorry.’” Morag set the page down. “That is the end of the codicil. She signed it eight months ago, in this office, sound of mind, two witnesses, and I want to be clear that it is not a loophole I can talk her family out of. It is about as solid as a document gets.”
Nobody spoke. Through the window behind her a bus went past with a whisky advertisement wrapped round its entire side, absurdly cheerful, and I looked at it for a while because it was easier than looking at Mateo.
“She could have left it to a translator she trusted,” I said at last. “There are twelve people in this city who would have done it competently and never once made each other insane.”
“She could have,” Morag agreed. “She didn’t. I did ask her about that, for what it is worth, when she drafted it. She said—“ Morag glanced at a note, which I suspected was less for accuracy than for the ordinary human mercy of not having to say the words in her own voice. “‘Tell them I am not being cruel. Tell them I have read everything they have ever translated, together and apart, and the together version is better every single time, and somebody in that marriage needs to say so before it is too late for the sentence to matter.’”
I heard Mateo exhale through his nose, the short one that meant something had landed somewhere he could not immediately defend.
“She knew that wasn’t fair,” I said, to the room, to nobody.
“She generally did,” Morag said, not unkindly. “She also left forty pages of margin notes in the manuscript itself, which neither of you has seen, and which I am obliged to tell you are addressed — I am quoting her instruction to me — ‘to the two people who will actually read them, not to whichever translator ends up holding the pages.’ I don’t know what that means. I assume you will.”
Mateo looked at me then for the first time. He was forty-one and had cut his hair shorter than he used to wear it, which suited him in a way I resented on principle, and there was a version of me, the version who had not spent two years turning that exact face into a professional fact she could file, who wanted very badly to ask how Madrid was treating him. I did not ask.
“Six months,” he said to Morag, in the tone he keeps for contract terms. “From today, or from the reading?”
“From today.”
“And if one of us simply declines.”
“Then it reverts, and her last book sits in a vault for the rest of both your lives, and in thirty years somebody publishes a note in a journal explaining that it exists and cannot be printed, and wondering why.” Morag took the glasses off. “She was thorough. I will give her that.”
“She was a menace,” I said, and something in my voice must have carried more grief than anger, because his mouth did the thing it used to do when he was trying not to smile at a moment with no business being funny.
“She was,” he agreed. “The absolute worst. God rest her.”
It was the first thing either of us had said directly to the other in three years that was not logistics — a flight change, a piece of forwarded post, a solicitor’s copy line. It was such a small thing, agreeing that our dead friend had been a menace, and it undid something in my chest anyway, some careful stitching I had done for the specific purpose of making sure this exact undoing could not happen by accident in an office on a Tuesday morning.
Morag closed the file and said the sensible thing, which is what she is paid for.
“For what it is worth, ‘the same room’ is the kind of phrase that gets read generously every day of the week. A call is a room, on a reasonable construction. Alternating pages, an agreed schedule, everything by email. I could write you an opinion this afternoon and I doubt anybody would ever test it.”
And that is where I did the thing I have been turning over ever since.
“No,” I said. “As written.”
Mateo turned his head. Morag waited with her pen up, which I have come to understand is her way of giving a person one last chance to be reasonable in private.
“Same pages, same room,” I said. “If we do it any other way and it comes out well, somebody will be able to say she was wrong about us, and I would rather not hand them the sentence.”
That was the reason I gave. It was a good reason. It was even partly true, which is the most dangerous kind. What I did not say, because I was thirty-eight and had not been in a room with my ex-husband since the decree and intended to hold that line with my face if nothing else, was that some competitive, unhealed, badly brought-up part of me had heard Giulia’s condition and thought, instantly, without consulting the rest of me: good. Let him sit down opposite me for six months. Let us see which of us blinks first about a comma.
“Mr Arrieta?” Morag said.
“As written,” he said. “She would have known if we cheated. I couldn’t tell you how. She would have known.”
“Then I will need you both to sign the acknowledgement, and I will date the six months from this morning.” She slid two pages across, one each, and while we signed she carried on in the flat tone of a woman clearing her list. “I have her study key. Renzo has agreed you can work there — he will want to meet you both properly first, and I would manage your expectations on how warmly, but the room is yours from Monday. There is a desk built for two people who used to argue about elbow room, apparently. She had it made.”
“Of course she did,” I said.
“One more thing.” Morag folded her hands over the closed will the way a woman does when she has kept something back on purpose. “She left instructions that the study is not to be tidied before you arrive. Her wording: ‘They will want to see how I actually worked, not the version I would have cleaned up for a memorial.’ Renzo was not thrilled. He would rather remember the desk the way she kept it for guests.”
“She never kept it any way for guests,” I said. “She kept it exactly as it always was and made everybody else adjust around her.”
“That is consistent with everything else I know about her.” Something like real warmth got through the professional surface for a moment. “I met her twice. The drafting and the signing. I liked her enormously both times.”
“Everybody did,” Mateo said. “That was rather the problem, from where we were standing.”
He was still looking at me and not at Morag, not at the will, not at the whisky advertisement receding cheerfully down the road. “Same table,” he said. Not a question. A fact he was testing the weight of out loud, the way he used to test a difficult line before he would commit it to the page.
“Same table,” I said, and did not know, walking out of that office into a wind that had turned since we went in, whether I had agreed to finish a dead woman’s book or to start an argument that had been waiting three years for a room small enough to have it in.
On the pavement he held the door out of two decades of reflex that neither of us had bothered to unlearn. We stood there a moment too long, each deciding privately whether the goodbye required words or only distance.
“Read the whole will tonight,” I said, because it was easier than saying anything true. “Not the summary. There will be something in it we did not hear.”
“I read contracts for a living, Elodie. Same instinct.” He almost smiled again. “Monday, then.”
We did not shake hands. We had never been a couple who shook hands, and starting now would have made the last three years look like a longer distance than either of us was ready to concede.
Scene break
I did not tell my mother that week. I told her I had a new project, a difficult one, a friend’s posthumous novel, all of it true and none of it the truth, and she said that sounded lovely and asked whether I was eating properly, and I said yes, which was also a fact rather than the truth.
What I did instead, the night after the reading, was open the one drawer in my flat that I keep locked, which is an affectation, since I live alone in Marchmont and nobody is coming for it, and take out the folder of Mateo’s drafts that I corrected in secret for two years after he left.
Work he never asked for. Work he has never seen. Sentences I tightened the way you straighten a picture frame in a house you no longer live in.
I read the whole folder through once, start to finish, for the first time since I stopped adding to it.
They were good. That was the humiliating part. They would have been good without me, and I had spent two years pretending otherwise, pretending the improvement was the point rather than the excuse.
One draft near the bottom stopped me longer than the rest. A passage about a man packing a kitchen into boxes without once asking his wife which pieces she wanted to keep, deciding for her out of what he would have called kindness and what I would have called, at the time, the precise and controlled violence of never being consulted about your own life. I had tightened three sentences in it and left the fourth alone, because I could not improve on it, and reading it again I understood, with the particular discomfort of recognising yourself in somebody else’s revision history, that I had left it alone because it was the truest thing either of us had ever written about the year our marriage actually ended, and I had not wanted to touch it in case touching it meant admitting that I had noticed.
I closed the folder before I could read that page a second time. I locked the drawer, which is ridiculous, and stood in my own hallway with the key in my hand like a woman in a novel I would have complained about translating.
Six months. A desk built for two. And a dead woman entirely convinced that the together version was better every single time.
I was going to spend the whole of it finding out whether she was right, or whether some sentences, once broken, simply stay broken, no matter how precisely you go on mending them in the dark, alone, where nobody can see that you are still trying.