The House on Fortune Street by Margot Livesey

found himself writing about Tuscany and the euthanasia book.
     
    He was describing the latter when he heard the front door open and close, followed by footsteps mounting the stairs. Abigail embraced him where he sat. “Are you ready to take a break?”
    “Five minutes,” he said, and dashed off a last paragraph.
    When he came downstairs she had set out beer and cheese. While he helped himself to both she told him that advance ticket sales for Hull were promising, and visits to two schools had been arranged. He nodded and ate and drank. He felt a keen determination not to bring up the letter.
    “Have you ever been to Hull?” she asked, cutting a wedge of cheddar. “No. I picture it as rather gray and gloomy. Maybe that’s just the
    name: Hull, dull, skull.”
    “I was there with my parents when I was four or five. All I remember is a black dog in the park.” She pushed her hair back purposefully.“Can I see the letter?”
    Reluctantly he returned upstairs and retrieved it from between the pages of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a book he hadn’t opened for nearly a decade and which he had hoped not to open for a decade more. In the kitchen he handed the envelope to Abigail. She looked closely at the blurred postmark and drew out the folded sheet. She read it a couple of times as if the original might yield a different meaning than the fax.
    “Who do you think wrote this,” she said, “a man or a woman?” “Something about the phrasing—Mr. Cupid, Sunshine—seems
    more masculine.” “That’s my guess too.”
    They began to debate between the stage manager, the accountant, and the wardrobe mistress. Sean was at his wittiest, proposing wild theories about who fancied whom. He made her laugh, he made himself laugh, with his increasingly outrageous suggestions. But later, in bed, levity failed him; only by dint of Abigail’s efforts did they make love.
     
    he next day was one of his afternoons at the theater and,
    even as he hung up his jacket, everyone seemed excessively friendly. In the middle of a conversation about props with the stage manager, or a joking exchange with the accountant, he would catch himself wondering, Did you write the letter? Did you? At his desk, ostensibly editing a grant application, he found himself parsing, in minute detail, the way the accountant had offered to buy him coffee—“You take it white,” she had said—or the fund-raiser’s praise of Abigail. Several times, he looked up from his computer, convinced he was being watched, only to find his colleagues absorbed in their tasks. Meanwhile Abigail was returning phone calls, making lists, pleading with people to take on one more thing. He could not detect the slightest sign of uneasiness.
    Three days later she left for Hull. An hour after her taxi pulled away, the phone rang; it was Valentine. Before Sean could launch into his standard speech about how well his chapters were going, Valentine said, “So listen. Abigail told me someone wrote a stupid letter.”
    “A letter?”
    “Of course you know the pub is on my way home,” Valentine went on, very heartily. Once or twice he had stopped in for a drink and, no surprises, run into Abigail. Surely he had said something? But if he hadn’t, if neither of them had, it was because it was such an everyday occurrence.
    Everyday, Sean thought, or every day? “Of course,” he repeated. “Did you ever hear back from that doctor the secretary recommended?”
    They chatted about the book for what felt like fifteen minutes but was probably barely five. Without consulting him, or even mentioning it after the fact, she had told Valentine. Was that a sign of innocence or guilt? He couldn’t decide, and there was no way he could ask; the natural channels of communication between him and Abigail, those glittering, lively streams that had begun to flow at their first meeting,
     
    were now clogged with doubt and disagreement, forced underground. Only after he hung up did he wonder