“She sat at the desk in her room, took out a sheet of paper, and began a letter she would never send.She wrote ‘Dear Colonel Junot’, then paused, because the word ‘dear’ loomed up at her like a vulgar word, even though thousands of letters began that way, even those from prosaic counting houses. She drew a line through it anyway, then crumpled the page. She reminded herself that the letter was going nowhere, and wrote ‘Dearest Hugh’ on another sheet.Freed of that constraint, she said whatever sh...e wanted. She described the long night of comforting sorrow of such a magnitude she scarcely could grasp it. The words poured on to the page, and another like it and another, as she wrote of the young girl who spent her entire night patting the bedclothes and searching the room for her little one, a half-French infant strangled at birth by a midwife in a remote Portuguese hamlet.She faltered a moment, then wrote of the girls whose troubled minds compelled them to act out their rapes over and over.MoreLessRead More Read Less
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