excerpt

...Not nearly enough words to change a man of his age. Or at least would not have been had they not been written in that flowing script which is the legacy of a Sacred Heart education. Or if, perhaps, they really were as meaningless as they may appear to one who does not know better. Perhaps if they had not been in reply to a much longer letter, penned by the recipient of this note, so infused with the desperation of a shunned beloved, so enthused with his unrequited passions that it became less a love letter and more a dissertation on the waning senility of the writer himself. But still, to change a man not once but twice? To send him hurtling down paths as contradictory to each other as pain and pleasure?

No, to change him first into a stranger and to change him now into an estranged beloved it would take much more than a few lyrical words. And it did, for it were not the words themselves or the words at all that changed him, then or now, it was that unforgivable underline put in place to emphasize a last name that he did not need any assistance to recognize as not his own.

And so, as he read the note over and over again he recognized the phantasmagoric nature of true love which, by granting meaning to the most inane, the most banal, and the most innocuous of things creates an insufferable, incurable fissure between two lovers which both divides and unites them. The words of admonishment now seen freed from the oppression of circumstances became not a rebuke at all but a summons, and so insolently did they demand his compliance that when the news of his daughter in London becoming a widow well before she deserved such a tragic title reached him, though his very first thought was undeniably of his daughter, his second, inexorably, was of Rehana...