Archive of Our Own

Gordon had always worried about Ramona. 

Not in the ordinary way that a grandfather worries for his grandchild, or a father worries about his daughter. Although he did worry about scraped knees and how many vegetables she was eating too. The thing that worried him most, was how good she was at being alone.  

It wasn't shyness. He'd have known what to do with shyness, he would be able to eventually open her world a bit more than before. But Ramona wasn’t shy. She'd sit through a whole birthday party for her classmate, answer politely when spoken to, eat her slice of cake, and come home afterward having said maybe a total of eleven words that weren't required of her. And she wasn’t sad about it. She would come home, acting like she had completed a chore rather than having an exciting afternoon, unlike other seven year olds might think. 

But then, when it was just the two of them. It was like all of her uninterest in people disappeared. Sure, she was never talkative, and he had learned to ask her open ended questions so she couldn’t answer with a good or an okay. But she was funny. She was funny in a specific, deadpan way. She would do impressions of her teachers, she had strong opinions on all of their neighbours and half the time Gordon would say mildly, Ramona, that's not a very nice thing to say about Mrs Fletcher, and Ramona would just look at him entirely unbothered, and respond, well lucky I didn't say it to Mrs Fletcher, as if that settled it. And the maddening thing was, it mostly did settle it, because she wasn't cruel, she was just honest. She'd tell another child that their drawing of a horse didn’t look like a horse, and she’d simply tell people that she had no interest in playing on the swings at recess. She wasn't blind to how it landed, she simply hadn't decided it was worth the effort of landing softer.

She would do all of that, and then the next day, she'd give her entire lunch to a kid who'd forgotten theirs, without being asked and without mentioning it to anyone. Gordon would only find out because the school rang to ask if Ramona had brought a packed lunch herself, because they hadn't seen her eat anything. 

That was Ramona. A girl who would hand a stranger her lunch without a second thought and then tell that same stranger without care that she didn't want to sit with them at recess, and then see no contradiction in it whatsoever. 

He supposed that was the whole trouble with her. She wasn't incapable of knowing people, she was just particular about them. Most people got the version of Ramona that did what was needed and then left again. Almost nobody got asked in any further than that. Gordon, who got the full report most evenings, the jokes, and all the rest of it, sometimes forgot that to everyone else she was just the quiet girl at the edge of a birthday party. 

He worried about it the way he worried about most things with her. Quietly, and without much hope of changing it, because he'd learned his lesson about pushing with her mother. So mostly he just watched, and hoped that one day there might be more than one person let in as far as he. 

Sometimes he wondered if Annie and Connor would have made a difference. A brother and sister, Ramona didn’t know she had. He didn’t know either of them. The deal with Steven was for each of them to stay out of the others lives, but it was hard. A deal he'd made and kept for reasons that had made sense once and made less sense every year he kept them. He regretted it. He regretted taking the opportunity of a bigger family away from Ramona. He imagined sometimes that a house with more children in it might have worn Ramona's edges down. Connor and Annie were both such curious, talkative children, even at two years old. He wondered sometimes what a version of Ramona raised alongside them, as the youngest of three, might look like. Whether she’d find more ease at being the centre of attention than she did now. Whether she'd have had two people who simply refused to leave the room when she went quiet on them. A sister who'd have gone looking for her when she disappeared into herself the way she did. A brother who might have dragged her into things she'd never have agreed to on her own, and she'd have gone along complaining the whole way and never quite admitted she'd wanted to be dragged. People who were just there, at every breakfast, at every momentous occasion, at every birthday. Someone she could argue with, but sit with at the end of the day.  

He'd never know now whether it would have made any difference at all, and there was no sense picking at a decision settled years back, but he let himself think it anyway, some nights. 

It was easier in the summer not to think about any of it. In the summer there was Sterling Point, and there was Ellis, and for two months a year Gordon watched something in Ramona relax that never quite relaxed the rest of the time.

And then, when Ramona was eleven and arriving at Sterling Point for the summer, there was Oona. 

He had known that a family was moving in on the houseboat by the marina. Being who he was on the island, and there wasn't much that happened on it that locals didn't hear about eventually. A mother, two girls, and a younger man who looked so flaky that Gordon had never bothered to learn his name. He hadn’t thought of them any deeper than anyone else on the island, except for noting that the older girl was around Ramona’s age, probably twelve to Ramona’s eleven. He didn’t expect them to get along, he was used to losing the battle for Ramona’s friends a long time ago. But then one day, Joe’s young Ellis came running toward him when he was passing by the marina, out of breath, having run to find him. 

There was a girl, the new one from the marina, and she'd gone into the water off the cliffs, past the point without knowing about the current there, and Ramona had jumped in after her. 

By the time Gordon got down there, it was over, and the only evidence left of how close it had come to not being fine was the new girl, doubled over on the rocks coughing up water, and Ramona kneeling beside her with a steadiness that unsettled him more than panic would have. Apparently, she had jumped in and got an arm around the girl, hauling the two of them to the edge of the water, simply sitting with her as she coughed it all out. 

Gordon's heart didn't slow down properly until he was close enough to see for himself that they were both breathing.

He didn't shout. He came close to it, on the walk down, but he lost all appetite for it the moment he saw Ramona's face, looking much more mature than eleven, and understood she'd already frightened herself worse than he could manage to.

The new girl recovered faster than you’d expect. She sat up, wrung the water out of her hair with the matter-of-fact air of someone this had happened to before, and grinned up at Ramona.

"Well," she said, “that was kind of awesome,”

"You could have died," Ramona replied, with as much dignity as a dripping wet eleven year old on a rock could manage.

"Probably," the girl agreed, entirely unbothered. She stuck a hand out, still catching her breath. "I'm Oona."

Ramona looked at the hand like she wasn't sure what to do with it, and then took it anyway. "Ramona,"

Gordon gave them a lecture, of course. Both together, and later Ramona on her own for good measure. But at the end of the day, he put a third glass of lemonade out on the patio. He had a feeling they might need it.

That was the start of it. Gordon didn't know that yet, standing there on the rocks with his heart still catching up to itself. But he'd think about that afternoon a lot in the years that followed.

In the weeks after, Oona was simply there, the way Ellis was there. Down at the dock in the mornings, up at the house by dinner, on the porch steps with dirt and sand in their hair. Ramona and Ellis argued, the easy, familiar kind of arguing that came from having known each other since before either could talk, mostly about whose turn it was to steer the boat or whether a rule in whatever game they'd made up that afternoon had just been invented on the spot. Ramona gave as good as she got in those, dry and merciless, and Ellis took it the way he took all of Ramona's moods, without complaint.

But with Oona, there wasn't much arguing at all. It was something else.  The two of them fell into step so easily it barely looked like effort, finishing each other's plans before either had fully said them out loud, Oona narrating some elaborate scheme and Ramona simply going along with it, unquestioning, in a way Gordon had genuinely never seen her go along with anything. He'd watch her let Oona talk her into things; a longer walk than she would have taken alone, a game she would have called pointless from anyone else, sitting through one of Oona's long, winding stories about her old towns without once checking the time. And for the first time, it seemed like Ramona wanted to be there for it all. She wasn’t waiting to leave, she wasn’t dreaming of heading back to the cottage to read, she didn’t need any convincing. They had become a package deal. 

Gordon would watch the three of them from the porch some evenings, Ellis wedged between the two girls as they talked about god knows what. And then Ramona would laugh. Like, really laugh, loud and lovely in a way that used to feel rare but didn’t anymore. 

Ramona got sunburnt for the first time in years that summer, because she forgot to come in off the dock when he called her. One day she arrived home with scraped knees, and grass stains covering her clothes that he would never get the full story from. She came home late a few times, which she’d never done, but Gordon didn’t have it in him to be mad. Because Ramona was so happy. And he could never be mad at anything that made his girl as happy as she was. 

Then August came. 

Ramona didn't say much about it in the days leading up to their usual departure day. But she had never been one to announce how she was feeling, and Gordon had long since learned to not go digging for it. But he noticed that she was spending longer out than usual. Eating breakfast faster and arriving home for dinners later. She stared out the windows more, as if trying to map the summer in her mind in a way that she had never done before. 

On the drive back to Barrie, Ramona stared out the window in silence. It was only when Sterling Point had disappeared entirely around the corner that Gordon glanced over and saw that she was crying. She was trying hard not to, her jaw set, but still tears were pouring out the corners of her eyes. He didn't make a thing of it. He just reached out and put a hand on her knee in the passenger seat, and squeezed it three times: I love you.  

He didn’t say anything. Because he knew there wasn’t anything he could say that would make it better. He had been through this before, with Goldie.

Ramona wrote to Oona that winter, more than she'd ever written to anyone else. Letters were sent off from Barrie every week, with new ones returning most weeks too, in handwriting that got steadily messier and more crowded toward the bottom of the page like Oona had run out of room for everything she wanted to say and refused to leave any of it out. Gordon never read them. He wasn't in the business of reading Ramona's mail, not even the parts of it she left lying open on the kitchen table. But he saw the stack of them grow in the drawer of her desk over the winter, thick as a book by the time March came round, and he saw the particular way Ramona's face changed when the post came and there was one in it. He always made sure that he bought more stamps every time he passed the post office. 

The next summer they came back to Sterling Point, and as soon as the car was parked in town, Ramona was beelining to the marina. Gordon didn’t complain, just laughed as she disappeared around the corner in the direction of Ellis and Oona. 

That summer was quieter than the first. There was less discovery for them, and more habit, the two of them falling straight back into whatever rhythm they'd left off in August without needing to rebuild it from scratch. Oona’s mother’s boyfriend had left over the winter, but Gordon heard word that she had a new one from the next town over. Oona had a growth spurt since Gordon had last seen her, where her and Ramona were last year a similar height, the slightly older girl had completely spurted upwards, but it didn’t change anything between the two of them. 

The biggest change that summer was another new addition. Sully was a Muskoka local since birth, and Gordon knew his parents quite well by now. But he and Ramona had never gotten close. Gordon always just assumed that Sully was too excitable for her. 

It turned out that all they needed to reach one another was Oona. Somewhere over the winter, the two of them had found each other, and by the time Ramona was back at Sterling Point, it was simply a fact that they were now friends. Gordon could see the momentary flash of fear in Ramona’s eyes when she told him about their new addition, but it didn’t take her long to get comfortable. 

Gordon watched it settle in over the following weeks with quiet amusement. Four of them now, where there'd been two and then three. Oona and Ramona side by side, Ellis quiet but comfortable, and Sully confident enough to fill whatever gaps the other three left open. An unlikely enough group on paper. But he'd learned by then not to bet against anything that Oona and Ramona did together.

The letters started up again the moment August came back around, same as the year before, thicker by the week, and Gordon bought his stamps and said nothing. He knew then that it was not a summer thing. Just a thing. 

Ramona was thirteen when Gordon understood truly, without needing to be told, that she was a lesbian. It didn’t arrive in a single moment. There was no conversation, or catching her doing anything, nothing to point at and say this moment here is when he knew. It just slowly dawned on him. And he had to admit, deep down he always knew. 

But then there was a girl. It had nothing to do with Oona. Oona was still just Oona, her best friend. It was a girl back in Barrie who tipped him off, a classmate Ramona mentioned twice over the course of the school year, both times with the same careful, deliberately flat delivery she used for things that mattered more than she wanted them to. Hazel, her name was. Gordon wouldn't have thought anything of a name said once. A name said twice, in that particular voice, over a Scrabble board in February, was its own kind of telling.

He noticed other things too, once he'd started looking, though he was careful never to look too hard, or too obviously. He noticed the way she’d look at herself in the mirror now, fixing her sleeve before leaving the house for school. He became aware of the absence of any boy's name at all, in thirteen years of conversations with her. 

He didn't ask. He didn’t feel the need to. It was just another thing about her, alongside her colourblindness and her hatred of tomatoes. 

Besides, he was quite grateful. When they were younger, he was always worried what would happen if she and Ellis got too close. He was glad he never had to deal with the conversation involving no, you cannot date Ellis because he is secretly your half brother and we never told you. Besides, he didn’t want to deal with another Andersen boy anytime soon. Goldie and Joe were enough drama for an old man’s lifetime. 

Whatever came of Hazel, if anything came of her at all, Gordon never heard about it. The name stopped coming up, and he didn't ask about that either. He just noted, filing it away with everything else he knew and loved about Ramona.

The summer after Ramona had turned fourteen, two things happened. 

The first was that Gordon felt tired. He was an old man, and had been for many years by now. But in previous summers, he would spend the day helping down at the marina, or walking in town. This summer, he was just too tired. He spent most of his time indoors, or on the porch. Nothing was wrong that he’d confront a doctor with, nothing worth mentioning to Ramona (he couldn’t admit to himself that she had noticed the shift long before he had). He was just tired in a way sleep didn't fix anymore. There was a heaviness on the stairs that hadn't been there the summer before, a stiffness in getting up out of the porch chair. He put it down to age, because it was easier than the alternative, and he was old, and old men were allowed to be tired. He said nothing to anyone. That was a skill he was used to by now. 

The second was Oona. She had arrived at fifteen, already knowing exactly who she was. Gordon wondered if she ever didn’t know. If she didn’t, she was very good at hiding it. That summer was the first time that Gordon truly realised he was going through parenting a teenager once again. While Ramona was certainly different to Goldie in personality and desire for romance, hearing Oona confidently rattle off nicknames of random tourist girls reminded him that at his old-age, he’d be reliving being a teenager for the second time. 

It was good theatre, and Gordon enjoyed hearing it from afar as much as all of their friends seemed to enjoy it. But it took him most of the summer to notice what the theatre was covering for.

It wasn't the yacht club girls Oona was actually watching. It was Ramona. She was always glancing, quick, the second after she'd delivered whichever line had gotten the biggest laugh out of Sully, checking every single time, whether it had landed with the one person who mattered. Ramona rarely gave her much. A smile occasionally, a huff moreso, or the flat unimpressed look she gave everyone, which Oona seemed to collect like a prize rather than take as the dismissal it would have been from anyone else. Every time, without fail, Oona went right on performing anyway, louder and funnier, angling the whole show a little more in Ramona's direction than she probably realised she was doing.

Once Gordon realised, he couldn’t help but smile at the sight. At the glances and extra hand holding Oona would reach out for. He was always grateful that Ramona had Oona. But in those moments, he was glad Oona had Ramona too. He had known Oona’s mom for as long as he’d known Oona now, and he had long stopped expecting much of her. There was always a new man, or a new story for why the last one left, or some crisis that seemed to take up whatever room that should have been kept for her children. Maple was growing now, ten years old and spent more time with Oona and her friends than she had done in the years prior. He supposed she didn’t like being left on the house boat all alone while their mother disappeared for a fortnight. 

It was Oona who kept Maple fed most mornings, Oona who kept her company and listened and learned her interests, Oona and Ramona who taught her how to swim. And Oona never once complained about it. It was simply the shape her life had, and she'd built herself around it the way water built itself around whatever rock happened to be sitting in the middle of a river stream.

Gordon thought that probably explained some of the loudness, and the relentless good cheer. A girl who spent half her life being the grown-up in her own house didn't get to be young very often anywhere else. Summer, and Ellis and Sully, and the tourist girls, and most of all Ramona…that was where Oona got to be fiften instead of fifty. Gordon found he couldn't begrudge her a single minute of the performance, once he understood what it was standing in for.

Ramona, for her part, seemed to have no idea she was the point of any of it. She watched Oona's whole production with the same fond, faintly exasperated patience she always had, laughing when it was funny, rolling her eyes when it wasn't, entirely unaware she was the reason for any of it. Gordon didn't think that was an act. Ramona wasn't a good enough liar to fool him on something like this, and there was none of the tightness in her he'd have expected if she'd known and been sitting on it.

He didn't say anything outright. That wasn't how he did things, and he wasn't about to start rearranging two teenagers' feelings for them like furniture. But one evening, watching Ramona get up to go find something in the kitchen, he said, mild as anything, not looking up from his book, "Does Oona want to stay over for the night?”

Ramona paused. “Why?"

"No reason," Gordon replied, turning a page. "Maple's just probably asleep by now. Gives their mom one less mouth to feed in the morning, and it’s not like we don’t have the room. It might be nice for the two of you,”

He watched as Ramona weighed the idea in her mind. 

What Gordon didn't say was that he'd worked out, that a night away from the boat was a night Oona didn't have to be anyone's mother. She didn't have to listen for Maple, didn't have to plan around whichever version of her mom would be home, and that the bed across from Ramona’s was about the only place on the whole island where Oona got to simply be fifteen and nothing else. He didn't say any of that. He didn't need to.

Ramona went and asked Oona that evening, and came back to report that Oona had said yes.

It became a habit after that, a standing offer throughout all of summer. The spare bed was made up more often than not, despite knowing that half of the time the two of them ended up falling asleep, squashed together as Ramona read her books out loud to an Oona who just loved to listen to her speak. He'd hear the two of them up late through the wall some nights, laughing low so as not to wake him, and he'd lie there in the dark and smile to himself. Ramona might not have had her mother, or her siblings by her side, and Gordon wouldn’t live forever. But he knew that she would always have Oona. They were unbreakable. 

By winter, back in Barrie. Gordon couldn’t ignore the tiredness anymore. 

A cough appeared and didn’t dissipate. His chest felt tighter, his feet felt clumsier. He put it down to age, same as he'd put everything down to age these past two years, and he might have gone on doing that a bit longer if his body hadn't started making the argument harder to win. 

His hunger lessened. He slept longer. His hands shook. 

So he went to the doctor, alone. He came home with a folder that he put straight in the bottom drawer of his desk, right next to the letters marked Annie and Connor that he had never sent, explaining everything. He didn’t look at the folder for a week. When he did look at it, he read it twice, and then he put it back and didn't tell anyone at all.

He told himself, at first, that there'd be time enough for telling Ramona later, when he understood it better himself, when he had something more useful to offer than a word that would scare her. February came and went that way. Then March. He caught himself, some evenings over the Scrabble board, rehearsing sentences he never said out loud: there's something I should tell you. But he didn’t, and the moment passed. He was too used to keeping secrets. 

Ramona noticed anyway, slower than he expected but not so slow as he'd have liked. Where Gordon kept things locked away, Ramona asked them straight up.

“You’re sick, aren’t you?” she asked at the dinner table, without anything to lead up to it. 

Gordon sighed, and closed his eyes. He could have lied. He'd had four months of practice at it by then, and the lie was right there. But when he opened his eyes, he didn’t just see Ramona. He saw her mother too. His two beautiful girls separated far too soon.

"A bit," he answered.

"A bit?” Ramona repeated, “what the fuck does a bit mean?” 

He told her more than he'd meant to, that evening, though still not everything because there were some things he thought a just turned fifteen year old had no business carrying. Ramona took it the way she took most things, quiet and still, no tears at the table, nothing he could point to afterward and call a reaction. She asked two questions, practical ones, about doctors and what came next, and then she went very carefully back to her tiles and won the game, and neither of them mentioned it again that night.

But something changed after that. She started reading the labels on his medication herself instead of trusting him to keep track of it, started turning up at appointments he hadn't told her the dates of, having simply found them out. He watched her, over the weeks that followed, as she quietly began the long work of learning how to take care of him. It didn’t take long for him to give up on trying to stop her, even though some nights he lay awake wishing fiercely that she didn't have to learn all of this at sixteen.

By the time June came round, he was moving much slower than he had the summer before, and there was no chance that the people closest to him wouldn’t notice. He went anyway. He wasn't going to be the reason that summer, her favourite time of the year, got taken away from Ramona. 

On their first night back, Oona and Ramona had organised for Oona to sleep over. 

Gordon went to bed early, same as he'd been doing most nights that year, and heard the two of them come up not long after, quiet and careful about waking him. He wasn’t sure they knew the walls were thin enough that he could hear the sound of their unintelligible whispers through the walls. 

Except that night, they remained mostly quiet. 

It didn’t take long for the smell to faintly drift under Gordon’s bedroom door. He almost got up. The instinctual side of him coming out, getting deja vu when he barged into Goldie’s room and found her and Joe smoking weed out of her window. This time, he stayed where he was. He decided if there was one summer to let it go, this was probably the one.

Through the walls, he heard them whisper and giggle as they worked through it, a bit of coughing here and there. There was some more of Oona's laughing after a louder of Ramona’s coughs, and then an immediate shut up from Ramona, without any real heat in it at all.

For a while after that it was quiet. Gordon had almost drifted off himself when he heard Ramona's voice again, different nowl. She was talking. Really talking, the way she hardly ever did even with him, sentences running into each other without any care or thought between them.

And then, somewhere in the middle of it, he heard her say his name, and heard her voice crack around it.

He went very still, listening closer. 

"He's not going to get better," Ramona said, not really whispering, like she been holding the words in her throat for months and finally was releasing them. "He keeps saying it's fine, like– like that means anything, and I looked at the folder, Oona, I like saw everything and he’s just– Oona, I just–,”

Gordon heard her stop mid sentence. And then heard the small, terrible sound of someone trying to cry quietly and losing the fight halfway through. Oona didn't say anything clever or try and lighten the mood like Gordon initially thought she might. Instead, he heard the muffled sound of her voice, most likely cracking from tears herself. 

“It’s okay, I’ve got you. I’m here,”

Gordon’s heart broke. He closed his eyes, clenching the tears that were appearing in them from pouring out at the sound of two heartbroken girls who had already been through too much. They understood one another, when they shouldn’t have to. 

Gordon lay on his side of the wall a long while after that, unmoving. There was nothing he could have offered through that wall that Oona wasn't already offering inside of the room. He didn't sleep much after that. Not until long after he had heard the sound of Ramona’s sobs lessen, and what he expected was the quiet steady breathing of the two girls fast asleep, intertwined in one another’s company.   

The rest of that summer went slower than any before it, probably because Gordon spent most of it on the porch, watching, because there wasn't a great deal else his body would let him do anymore. He watched Ramona and Oona on the dock some afternoons, the way he always had. Except they were older now. For the first time, he looked down at them and saw two young women. He wasn’t sure if it was because of what had happened to them, with Gordon’s diagnosis, and with Oona’s mom’s recent decision to go to India, leaving her and Maple behind, or if he just hadn’t realised how old they had gotten. In only a few months, Ramona would be sixteen. Which also meant, nearly sixteen years without Goldie. 

This summer though, Gordon appreciated everything a bit more. The cottage, the lake, the people. And he paid closer attention to everyone, especially Ramona. He noticed that she had taken up smoking more after that first night. And that she looked at her friends with such adoration. He noticed that she treated Maple like she was her own sister, and that she loved working down at the Marina with Ellis. And he also noticed that something between her and Oona had changed. 

He saw it properly for the first time somewhere in the middle of July. Nothing dramatic, just Oona saying something that had made Sully burst into laughter and Ellis roll his eyes so far back in his head with a big smile on his face, probably some insane thing about a rich tourist mother or something of the like. Gordon had glanced at Ramona to see if she was laughing too. And she wasn’t. But she wasn’t not enjoying herself, either. She was watching Oona with an expression Gordon had only seen on her a few times. But her face was so similar to her mother’s, that he could tell immediately what it was. 

Oh, he thought. There it is.

It wasn't new. He understood that immediately, looking at her. This wasn't a thing that had arrived that summer, it was a thing that had been sitting quietly in Ramona for years, patient and hidden like most things about her. He thought of Hazel, and understood, watching Ramona now, that any other girl had been a distraction, learning opportunities for a feeling that Ramona had already had the real version of the entire time, sitting three feet away from her on a dock. She had simply never let herself look at it straight on.

He had assumed how Oona felt about Ramona in the years before. But she had learned to hide it. She could focus on other people, without much care. But Ramona was different. Gordon could see it in her eyes, that this wasn’t something small and simple for her. He didn’t think she’d be able to bury this one down for long. 

He thought that it was a cruel kind of timing, that she could be working her way toward all of that just as he was running out of time to see any of it happen.

Then August came once more, and it was time to go back to Barrie.

Gordon had known, as he stepped back into their Barrie home, that he wouldn’t be returning to Sterling Point ever again. 

Within a month he wasn't getting out of bed most days before noon. Within two, there was a nurse coming twice a week, and then most days. Ramona had stopped mentioning school at the dinner table because there wasn't a dinner table anymore in any real sense, just plates of microwaved food that eventually turned into smush so that Gordon could swallow it. Ramona would sit by his side, a chair pulled close to his bed that had started to look like it belonged there.

For the first time in a long time, Gordon saw the old Ramona return. His fear of her isolation came back in waves. She didn’t ever seem to leave the house, except for groceries. She spent her days reading by his side, or playing scrabble with him, or feeding him and bathing him. And she didn’t call Oona. 

He asked about Oona more than once.

"Has Oona called at all?" he asked one afternoon, watching Ramona measure out his tablets with the careful, unhurried precision she'd gotten frighteningly good at.

"I don’t know, I haven’t checked the voicemail," she responded, not looking up. 

"You should check,"

"I will," She wouldn't, and they both knew it, but neither of them said so.

Another day, worse than most, his breath shorter than he liked, he tried again anyway, because some stubborn part of him wasn't ready to let it go quite yet.

 "You should call her. Even just to hear her voice."

"I'm a bit busy right now, Gordon," Ramona said, not unkindly, setting a glass of water on the nightstand. It was the tone she used, he'd noticed, whenever the subject came anywhere near Sterling Point, and her friends, brisk and practical. He let it drop that time too. 

It was on the days she went out for groceries, the only hours he ever really had to himself, that he started writing his will. 

The first decision he made was for Ramona’s guardianship. 

He didn’t like Joe, he never had. Not when he and Goldie were teenagers, and not when Goldie told her dad that she had divorced Steven and was planning to start a life with Joe. (He didn’t like Steven either though, we must get that straight). Gordon always considered Joe to be a weak man. He could get tattoos, grow a beard, and work with his hands all day. But inside, he was a small, weak man. Gordon would never forget when he first held Ramona, Joe looking at the two of them, all three of them crying. Ramona was beautiful. Even amidst the grief, Gordon could see that. He immediately fell in love with her, a little piece of his daughter, left behind. But still, he was prepared to hand her over to Joe. He was prepared to visit her occasionally, and for her to grow up with little Ellis as an older brother. But then he saw Joe’s face. And he saw the fear in it. And Gordon knew then, that Joe would never be Ramona’s father, not in any sense that mattered. Gordon couldn’t imagine, knowing Ramona every summer, and seeing the woman she was becoming, and not wanting to step up and be her father. 

So he didn’t want to give Joe this opportunity. But he knew he must. As much as Ramona would try and fight the suggestion, she deserved someone to look after her. 

Next up, were the letters. 

He'd had the letters half drafted for years, explaining that he'd made a promise to the twins father in the worst week of both their lives and had kept it a decade longer than sense should have allowed, that there was an island called Sterling Point they had never seen and a sister there who didn't know they existed, and that if his letter reached them at all, it meant that Ramona needed them more than ever. 

But what he wrote now was clearer, less filled with guilt. He wrote to Annie first. He wasn’t sure what to say, and it took him longer than it should have. But in the end, it was complete. And he was satisfied.

Annie. 

My biggest regret was not fighting harder to see you. Not because I didn’t love you. I shouldn’t have agreed to the plan. I'm sorry. I hope Sterling Point will reveal the truth. It was your mothers favourite place on earth. But most importantly Annie: Find her. She will need you after I am gone. 

Love, Gordon.

Ramona returned before he could write a letter to Connor, but eventually he did the same, changing some words here and there, but with the same theme. 

Ramona’s letter took him days to write. He wasn’t sure how to put everything into words. How much he adored her. How she had given him a second chance of being a father. 

He started it more times than he'd admit, most nights after she'd gone to bed, his hand slower on the page than it used to be and his mind, some nights, also slower to find the words. He wrote a version that was mostly an apology and tore it up, because he didn't think an apology was what she'd need from this, not really. An apology might make him feel better, but she deserved more than that. He wasn’t going to leave her with the worry of forgiving him. He wrote a version that was mostly practical, about the house, the island, and the paperwork she'd need, and tore that one up too, because it didn't sound like him at all, and if this was the last thing of his she'd ever properly read, he wanted it to sound like him.

He got there in the end, on a Tuesday, an hour or so after she'd gone up to bed still smug about her Scrabble win, the board not even put away yet on the bench that sat by his hospital bed where she'd left it. He looked at it a long moment before he started writing, and found, somehow, that it gave him exactly where to begin.

Dear Ramona,

I feel strange to write you this letter after you just beat me in Scrabble. The Q on the triple letter score was rather brutal, but all is forgiven. I wanted… no needed, to tell you how proud I am of you. You amaze me. You amaze me every day.Your stubbornness, your sense of humour, your strength. You've always been exactly who you are. And I love that person dearly. Thank you for giving me the honor of raising you. You gave me a second chance at having a daughter after we lost your mom. I wish the two of you could have spent more time together. I know you would have made each other laugh.

I'm sorry there were things I didn't tell you, hindsight is twenty twenty, but I wanted you to know at the time it felt like the right decision – maybe the only decision – but now I know I was very wrong. I'm incredibly sorry, my dear. 

But you are not alone, you have a family and I hope you found each other and together will make up for lost time.

 I know they will cherish you as much as I've cherished you. 

Love always, Gordon. 

He read it back once when it was done, and didn't change a word. 

He thought at this point he should feel a slight relief, or some peace of mind from everything being sorted. The island would be split three ways between them, they would all find each other, and someone would be looking after Ramona when he was gone. But he didn't feel it, not fully. What he felt instead, looking at the three folded letters, was the shape of everything the letters couldn't do. They could tell Annie and Connor the truth, eventually. They could tell Ramona she had a family waiting, who hopefully come looking for her. But they couldn't do the one thing he actually wanted done, which was to watch it happen. He wanted to see Ramona sitting across a table from a sister who talked as much as she didn't, and know for certain the two of them liked each other. To see her at the dock in ten summers' time, easy and unguarded in a way she still wasn't quite letting herself be, with a girl beside her who'd already been patient enough for a lifetime. He wanted to see her grow older than Goldie. It broke his heart a little to know he’d never be able to see either of them older than far too young. 

It was all a poor substitute. He thought to himself, lying there, that maybe he was as weak as Joe. Maybe this was the same thing. He had so many opportunities to tell everyone the truth. But he didn’t. He could tell Ramona about Annie and Connor now, but he won’t. 

He'd told himself for over a decade that his silence was protecting Ramona, giving her a settled childhood instead of a complicated one, sparing Annie and Connor a grief that wasn't theirs to carry. He'd built a whole justification around it, and it had held up well enough for a long time. But it didn't hold up so well anymore, lying in a bed he wasn't going to get out of, with three letters in a folder that were only going to be read once he could no longer be asked a single question about any of it.

He knew, some nights more honestly than others, that this wasn't really about easier for them at all. It was easier for him. It let him go on being, right up until the end, the version of himself Ramona had always trusted completely instead of the version who'd let a lie sit in a drawer for a decade and a half and never found the courage to clear it out while he still had the chance to stand there and take whatever came of it.

He thought that was probably the most honest thing he'd admitted to himself in years. He didn't do anything about it. That, too, felt honest. A man could know exactly what his weakness was and still not manage to be braver than it, right up until there wasn't any time left to be brave in at all.

More time passed, and Gordon knew he was reaching the end. He slept most of the day. He'd stopped being able to sit up for Scrabble two weeks ago, though Ramona still set the board up some evenings on the little table beside the bed and played both hands herself, narrating his moves for him as if everything were normal. 

He knew, in the plain, unfrightened way a man knew these things that he didn't have long left. He also knew that Canada Day was three weeks out, and that meant that it was almost time for their annual trip to Sterling Point. Ramona hadn't so much as mentioned the island once since Christmas.

"Pack a bag," he said one day. It came out slower than he meant it to, each word costing him something now, but he got it out.

Ramona didn't look up from the book she'd been reading at his bedside. 

"Pack a bag for what?”

"Sterling Point," he said, taking a deep breath. “It’s almost Canada day,” 

Ramona stared at him, hesitated, then looked back down at her book. 

"I'm not going anywhere." 

"Ramona." He waited until she looked up before he said the rest, because he only had the breath for one more try and he wanted her actually listening for it. "I want you there. This summer. Not here."

"I'm not leaving you.” She responded, dead serious.

He shook his head, small, because a bigger one cost more than he had. "Not asking."

"Then what are you doing?" she asked, and her voice cracked a little on it, the book forgotten now, closed shut in her lap.

He had to stop and gather himself before he could get the next part out, and he hated that, hated that even this took rationing, but there wasn't anything to be done about it anymore. "Telling you," he said finally. "I want you on that dock. Not this chair."

"I'm not leaving you to die alone so I can go swimming,” Her voice was barely a whisper by the end of it.

"You wouldn't be leaving me alone," he said. "There's a nurse. There's people."

She didn't answer that. Just held on to his hand tighter.

He waited a moment, gathering what was left, because there was one more thing he wanted said while he still had the breath to say it, and he wasn't going to get another good afternoon to try again. "Oona," he said.

Ramona froze for a split second, “what about her?”

“Find her. Tell her.”

Ramona shrugged, “tell her what?”

“Ramona.” He managed something close to a smile, small as it was. "Life's too short. I'd know."

It startled a laugh out of her, wet and broken and entirely against her will. "Jesus, dude,”

"Go to Sterling Point this Summer. Find…your people. Find her.” he managed to get out. Even he wasn’t sure which her he was talking about. He supposed both Annie and Oona worked. 

Ramona didn't answer. She just pressed her forehead down against the back of his hand and stayed there a long while, and Gordon let the subject rest, because he'd said everything he had breath left to say. She'd come around to it all in her own time, same as she came around to everything, or she wouldn't, and either way it was out of his hands now, finally, after years of trying to keep it in them. 

With his last efforts for the night, he gripped her hand tight. Squeezing, once, twice, three times. 

I love you. 

Ramona stayed there until he fell asleep. 

As he slept, Gordon hoped that his letters would work. He hoped that Ramona would find her family, blood or not, once and for all. 

Sometime during the night, Gordon Campbell died peacefully in his sleep, dreaming of the two girls he raised.