It came through her attorney to Aguilar to me, which meant that by the time I had it in my hands it had been read by at least three people who were not me, and I minded that more than I expected to.
Two pages. Lined paper. Small, careful handwriting that got smaller towards the bottom of each page, the way handwriting does when someone is worried about running out of room.
I am not going to reproduce all of it. Some of it was about her mother and it is not mine to hand around. But there are three things in that letter that I have never stopped thinking about, and those I will tell you.
The first is that she apologised exactly once, and not for what I expected.
She did not apologise for being in the roof. She explained it — plainly, without much self-pity — and the explanation was that she had nowhere else to go and that she knew the house and that after the first night, when nothing happened, the second night was easier, and after a week it had stopped feeling like a decision at all. She wrote that she understood that was not a justification. She wrote that she knew how it sounded.
What she apologised for was the cough.
She wrote that she had been ill for about ten days in July and had lain up there with her face in a sleeping bag trying not to make a sound, and that on one night she had failed, and that she had heard me stop moving in the kitchen underneath her, and that she had known in that moment exactly what she had done to me.
I am sorry I made you afraid in your own house, she wrote. I did not think of it as your house. That was my mistake and it was a large one.
The second is the ladder.
I had assumed — everyone assumed — that she put the ladder back each morning to avoid being caught. That is the obvious reading. A ladder against a house at dawn is the single most conspicuous object in a suburb.
She wrote that it was not that.
She wrote that the ladder had been her mother’s, that her mother had bought it in 1998 to clear the gutters, that she had held the bottom of it a hundred times as a teenager while her mother went up, and that leaving it out in the wet would have been, in her words, disrespectful to it.
She put it back under the tarpaulin every morning at five o’clock because it was her mother’s ladder and that is where her mother kept it.
I read that sentence and I put the letter down on my mother’s kitchen table and I did not pick it up again for two days.
The third thing is the one I have never told Dan.
Near the end of the second page, she wrote about Ellie.
She wrote that she had known there was a child in the back bedroom, the one with the window seat, because she had heard her through the ceiling. She wrote that the window seat had been hers, that she had done her homework on it for six years, and that she was glad it was somebody’s again.
And she wrote this: I want you to know that I never went down into the house at night. Not once. I only came down in the day, twice, when the house was empty, and both times I went straight out through the front door and pulled it shut behind me. I need you to know that, because I think you have been lying awake working out how close I came, and the answer is that I never came close, and I would not have.
I do not know if that is true.
That is the thing. I will never know if that is true. I have no way to verify it and neither does anyone else, and a person who has done something frightening has every reason to tell the frightened person that it was less frightening than it was.
But I have chosen to believe it. Not because the evidence compels it — the evidence is silent — but because the alternative is a version of the last year of my life that I cannot carry around, and because at some point you have to decide what you are going to do with a thing you cannot resolve.
I told Aguilar I had read it. I did not tell her what was in it. She did not ask.