The letters dropped to weekly in the spring, and the change was not gradual.
For two years the pattern had been erosion — missed evenings clustering and receding, ground lost and partially regained, the uneven fight Hamo had once reframed as evidence of something still trying. Then, over the course of nine days, it simply resolved into something regular. One letter, arriving Sunday evening, week after week, with the mechanical consistency of a thing that had stopped struggling and settled.
Thomas found the regularity worse than the erosion had been.
"It's given up," he said to Victoria, after the third consecutive Sunday. "Whatever was fighting to hold this open — it's stopped fighting and found a level it can sustain. That's not the same as healing. That's a wound closing over something still inside it."
"Or it's found a rate it can actually maintain, which is what a failing system does before it stabilizes rather than before it collapses." Victoria said it evenly, and Thomas understood she was not offering comfort so much as refusing to concede the pessimistic reading without evidence. "I'm not telling you it's good news. I'm telling you neither of us knows, and you've chosen the darkest available interpretation within about ninety seconds of the pattern establishing itself."
She was right, and he found it annoying, and told her so, and she laughed for the first time in some weeks.
The letters themselves had changed too, in a way harder to articulate.
They were still his mother's. The voice was unmistakable — the same warmth, the same tendency to circle back to a detail she'd already mentioned, the same small complaints about his father delivered with obvious affection. But the content had thinned. Where once she'd written four paragraphs about an ordinary week, she now wrote one, and it increasingly concerned things at a remove: the neighborhood, the weather, a program she'd watched. Less about herself. Considerably less about anything that had happened to her specifically.
The garden's coming in nicely this year, she wrote, that fourth Sunday. Sarah says hello. Your father's fine. Everything here is much the same as always.
Thomas read it four times and could not locate a single verifiable fact in it.
"She's not writing less because she has less to say," he told Hamo, in the scriptorium, the quire of discrepancies open between them. "She's writing less because — I think there's less there. I think the version of her the connection can still reach is thinner than it was. Not a person with a week behind her. Something closer to a summary of one."
Hamo considered that with his usual unhurried care. "You are describing something considerably stranger than degradation of a signal."
"I know."
"You are describing degradation of a person."
"I know that too." Thomas closed the quire. "And I don't know whether it's her that's thinning or only my access to her, and I've stopped believing I'll ever get to find out which."
Hamo was quiet for a long time.
"When I was a young monk," he said eventually, "there was a brother at our house who lost his memory in stages over about four years. He knew us, then he knew some of us, then he knew none of us but was content, then he was not content, then he was mostly asleep. I sat with him a great deal, because nobody else would." He turned his cup slowly on the table. "The thing I remember most is that I kept trying to determine, at each stage, whether he was still there. As though there were a threshold, and I could establish it, and know which side of it he was on. I never could. I eventually concluded the question was badly formed."
"That's not reassuring, Hamo."
"It was not intended to be. I am telling you that I have watched a person thin before, by an entirely ordinary mechanism, and that the not-knowing was the hardest part of it and never once resolved." Hamo met his eyes. "What I found, in the end, was that I could not answer the question of whether he was still there, but I could still answer the question of whether I was going to keep visiting. Those turned out to be separable. I would suggest they may be separable for you as well."
Thomas wrote back that Sunday, as he always did, and did not receive an answer, as he never had.
He kept writing anyway.