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What life could I give you? A life of the mind, rich with artists, laboring their creations—you would have that. You would be loved, certainly. But there are no other children in this house. And however deep the pleasures are for me in this community, would it be fair to bring you here, to bring you up here? For I have been to jail, it is true. Many others have, too. We are marked with our pasts, and with our present convictions. Almost weekly, I walk through streets of desperate poverty. I climb dark and narrow stairs to flats where so many children linger in the shadows. They do not go to school because there is not enough money to buy them all clothes, and they are afraid, perhaps because their mother is ill and expecting another child whose birth she might not survive, or because their father has been hurt in an accident and cannot work. Whatever slender thread of hope they have is fraying with every second. They work in the factories, these children, girls of 11 or 12 already hunched over machines, boys hauling wheelbarrows full of coal to fuel the furnaces, or they make flowers of cloth until they drop.

Would I have you there, in the midst of this?

Also, though I do not love this work of Vivian’s, I know it is important. And when I do it, I feel whole.

The lake was a cold gray-blue. I kept seeing you, running across the lawn, your beautiful mittens flashing. Anger churned within me. I tried to let it go. To still myself, and think what would be best. One thing I knew was this: to act rashly, out of anger, would be wrong. I wanted to be sure that my love for you was something that did not put my own feelings first, but rather looked from the outside, as a stranger might, and considered what would be the best for you, my beautiful and beloved daughter.

For this is what I have learned, in my short life: do not act out of anger. Act from love, or not at all.

I have seen it, how anger makes a space for what I must call evil. This is what I had come to understand, going with Vivian through the turmoiled streets, into the buildings where people suffered, where they died, and where grief and anger infected those who loved them as surely as any illness did, as insidious as any virus. I used to have a simpler idea. I used to think there was good and there was evil, that Geoffrey Wyndham was evil because he left me, left us. I thought his family was evil, too, because they lived carefree in the grand house while others labored on their land and hardly had enough to eat and were nothing in their eyes.

This is what I used to think, that some people were simply good and others were not, and that I, of course, was good. But now I think instead that evil is a force in the world, a force that seeks, and it finds its way into our lives through anger and loss, through sadness and betrayal, like mold on bread, like rot on an apple, it takes hold.

I was angry in the ruins when they laughed, shutting a door on the way I loved God and loved the church. I was blinded by anger when I stole the chalice because it bore the name of people who had hurt me.

And I was possessed by anger to think that Cora had let you forget me, had erased me—your mother—from your life.

I could have picked you up and boarded the train and made a life for you here.

But you were happy, well cared for.

It was my own brother who would raise you.

And Cora, though I do not admire her, though she does not like me, loves you.

I sat on the boulder on the edge of the lake for a long time. My legs were numb when I finally stood. I walked all the way back to town, gravel on the edges of the road crackling beneath my boots. Mrs. Elliot made me sit by the fire, and when I told her the decision I had reached, she did not scold me or try to change my mind, but only put her arm around my shoulders and said, Dear Rose, I am sorry to have brought this terrible sadness into your life. And I replied it was not she who brought it, but my own decisions, every time. And that is true.

I wrote to Joseph.