The first missed Sunday passed without much alarm.
The letters had been weekly for a year and a half by then, arriving each Sunday evening with a regularity Thomas had learned not to trust but had, inevitably, come to rely on anyway. When nothing came that particular Sunday, he told himself the obvious thing — that a system which had missed days by the dozen over six years could certainly miss one more — and went to bed, and did not sleep especially well.
The second Sunday also passed.
He told Victoria on the Monday, and watched her deliberately not do arithmetic at him, which he appreciated and which did not help.
"Two weeks isn't a pattern," she said.
"No."
"It also isn't nothing, and I'm not going to pretend it is." She set down her work. "What do you want to do?"
"There isn't anything to do. That's the entire nature of this. There has never once been anything to do." Thomas heard the edge in his own voice and made himself soften it. "Sorry. I'm not angry at you."
"I know who you're angry at. It's a machine and it can't hear you and you've been furious with it for six years." Victoria said it without any particular sympathy, which was, Thomas had long since learned, her most effective mode. "Sit down and eat something and be angry here rather than walking the ridge road at midnight again."
He sat down. He ate something.
The third Sunday, a letter came.
Everything here is fine. Sarah says hello. The weather has been much the same.
Twenty-one words. No greeting. No sign-off. Nothing about his father at all — and his father had appeared in every single letter for six years, without exception, usually as the source of some small affectionate complaint.
Thomas read it eleven times looking for something that wasn't there.
"It's her voice," he said to Hamo, in the scriptorium, the sheet copied out between them. "That's what makes it worse. If it read like something else — a stranger, a machine, anything — I could call it interference and stop trying to interpret it. It reads exactly like my mother saying almost nothing."
Hamo studied the copied words with the care he gave everything. "May I offer an observation that will not be pleasant?"
"You generally do."
"Your discrepancy quire contains, by my count, thirty-one entries. Every one of them is a thing added — a lake trip that did not happen, neighbors who did not exist, a sister. Every single divergence in six years has been accretion." He looked up. "This is the first that is subtraction. Your father has not been contradicted or altered. He has been omitted."
Thomas felt something go cold.
"I don't know what that means," Hamo said. "I want to be clear that I am not claiming to. I am telling you that it is a different kind of event than any of the previous ones, and that you have been careful for six years about recording exactly this sort of distinction, and I would be failing you if I softened it."
Thomas recorded it that night, in the thirty-second entry, in a hand less steady than the previous thirty-one.
He wrote a reply that Sunday, as always. He asked about his father directly — plainly, unmistakably, the sort of question no amount of thinning could route around.
He saved it to the drafts folder with the others.
Drafts (94).
The fourth Sunday brought nothing at all, and the fifth brought nothing, and on the sixth Sunday a letter arrived that read, in its entirety: Everything here is fine.
Thomas sat with it a long time in the dark garden.
Then he went inside, and told Victoria exactly what it said, and did not go walking on the ridge road, and slept badly, and got up the next morning and went to a council meeting about drainage on the eastern spur, and said several useful things about it.
That, he had come to understand, was most of what carrying a thing actually consisted of.