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The celebration for the baby's one-month birthday was at the house. Family, a few close friends, no fuss.

In the morning post, there was a letter. Handwritten, several pages, in an envelope with a London postmark. She recognised the handwriting before she saw the name.

She sat with it unopened for a while.

Then she read it.

Adrian Wyndham wrote about regret the way a person writes when they are running out of time to put it somewhere. He wrote about everything he'd taken from her, everything he'd failed to see, the years he'd spent discovering too late what he'd had. He wrote about the child they'd lost. He closed by saying he hoped, more than anything, that she was happy.

Eliana folded the letter along its original creases.

She held her daughter against her chest, feeling the small weight of her, the warmth.

Outside the window, Edinburgh was having one of its rare clear days — the kind of sky that looks like it's trying to apologise for all the grey ones.

She set the letter down on the sideboard.

And walked away from it.

Leave a bad thing, and the good follows naturally.

She had stopped waiting for that to be a philosophical argument and simply — experienced it.

The letter stayed on the sideboard. She didn't throw it away that day, and she didn't keep it. By the end of the week it was simply gone, somewhere in the ordinary movement of the house, and she didn't think about it again.