Chapter 16 - Thomasin’s Version of Love
Thomasin wrote me a letter.
Not to Lowri.
To me.
She said:
I did love her.
I believed that.
Then:
I also resented living with a dead woman.
There.
Celia’s photographs.
Stories.
Comparisons.
Family members saying:
“Celia used to…”
Lowri correcting Thomasin’s cooking:
“Mommy did it different.”
A five-year-old does that.
It hurts anyway.
Thomasin wrote:
I wanted one room where I wasn’t standing beside a ghost.
Reasonable feeling.
Then:
I started believing Beatrice when she said the therapist thought Lowri was stuck.
There.
It gave her moral permission.
If she disliked a photo:
Not jealousy.
Therapeutic progress.
If Lowri talked about Celia:
Not insecurity.
Reinforcing fixation.
People use professional language beautifully when it excuses what they already want.
Thomasin admitted removing five photographs.
Putting three into storage.
One into drawer.
One accidentally damaged while removing tape.
Lowri interpreted all as:
tearing Mommy out.
Then the reunion album.
Thomasin saw forty photographs.
Relatives crying.
Lowri carrying it from person to person.
Thomasin felt erased.
She snapped.
No coordinated plan with Beatrice to destroy it.
Her words:
Nobody here wants to remember you
were worse than what she intended.
She claimed she meant:
“Nobody wants to spend the whole reunion remembering grief.”
I believed that too.
Intent did not repair impact.
She wrote:
I wanted her to stop making Celia the center because I wanted to be allowed into the center.
That sentence explained everything.
A family is not a stage with one female lead.
But Thomasin had entered believing it was.
My mother encouraged that belief.
I tolerated it.
Lowri resisted.
The engagement could not survive.
Thomasin eventually accepted.
Not gracefully at first.
May you like
Eventually.
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