Letter 73 — When Memory Betrays

The Ashford Diaries is a serialized gothic mystery unfolding day by day in letters from Ashford Manor. New here? → Start reading from the beginning.

July 12, 1947
Ashford Manor

My dearest,

There is a night I’ve remembered a hundred times and now, suddenly, I don’t trust it.

It was the winter after you returned. Snow fell in long ribbons outside the window, and you built a fire in the drawing room. We drank something sweet and sharp, and you rested your head on my lap. I remember combing your hair back with my fingers. I remember you whispering, “We’re home now.”

But this morning, I found a page in my journal I don’t recall writing. It describes that very night—down to the crackling fire and the sugar on the rim of the glasses. But at the bottom, in handwriting that’s slightly too steady to be mine, there’s this:

“She kissed his forehead and said, ‘Tell me again where you were.’
And he lied.”

I don’t remember asking you that. I don’t remember you lying. But I do remember the feeling, now, of something unsaid thickening the air. Of a silence that wasn’t restful. A pause that lingered too long.

So which memory is mine? The warmth? Or the doubt?

Maybe that’s the cruelest part of grief: it rewrites the good as well as the bad.

—Calliope.

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— Dakkota Lane, author of The Ashford Diaries, a serialized gothic mystery unfolding letter by letter.

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