The Apology Letter
Draft 1 (2014)
Dear Marguerite,
I have been meaning to write this for a long time. I want to explain what happened in 2013 and why I acted as I did.
It began, really, in 2009, when I was still at Halcyon and you were —
Fourteen pages.
Draft 4 (2015)
Dear Marguerite,
I owe you an apology and I want to be honest that part of the reason I have not written is that I have been telling myself I was not entirely in the wrong.
The situation was complicated. There were things you did not know, and there were pressures on me that I do not think were visible from where you were standing, and I want to set those out not as an excuse but so that you understand —
Nine pages.
Draft 11 (2017)
Dear Marguerite,
I am sorry.
I have written this letter eleven times and every version has been an explanation. I have finally noticed that I keep writing explanations because I want you to reach the end of it and tell me it was understandable.
That is what I have actually been doing for four years. Not apologising. Constructing something you would forgive.
Four pages.
She did not send it.
Draft 19 (2020)
Dear Marguerite,
I have thought about writing to you for seven years.
What I did in 2013 was not a misunderstanding and it was not the result of pressure. I made a decision that was better for me and worse for you, and I knew it at the time, and I did it anyway, and then I spent seven years assembling a version in which I could not have done otherwise.
I do not expect a reply and I am not asking for one.
Two pages.
She got as far as the envelope.
What stopped her
The line about not expecting a reply.
She read it back and understood that it was not true. She wanted a reply enormously. And a letter that says I do not expect a reply while wanting one is still a letter that is doing something to the person receiving it, and she had spent seven years learning to spot exactly that.
Draft 26 (2023)
Marguerite,
I am sorry for what I did in 2013.
I am not going to explain it. Every explanation I have written has been for me.
If you would rather not hear from me again, you will not.
Four sentences.
She did not send this one either, and the reason took her another two years to find, and it is the reason this account exists.
The reason
Because in 2023, drafting it, she noticed that she had stopped being able to remember what she had actually done.
Not the shape of it. The shape was clear: a promotion, a piece of work, a conversation with a director in which she had said something that was true in isolation and false in effect, and Marguerite had been the one it landed on.
But the specifics — what she had said, exactly, and whether she had planned it in advance or produced it in the moment — had gone.
Eleven years of drafting had replaced the memory with the drafts.
She had rehearsed it so many times, in so many versions, each one slightly kinder to herself, that the original was no longer available to her. What she had instead was draft 26's account of draft 19's account of draft 11's account.
What she did about it
She went and found out.
There were four people who had been in the building. She contacted three; the fourth had died in 2019.
She did not tell them why. She said she was thinking about that period and wanted to check her memory, which was true and was also, she was aware, the twenty-seventh draft of something.
Two of them remembered nothing.
The third, a woman called Ines, remembered all of it.
What Ines said
That the conversation with the director had happened, and that it had been damaging, and that it had cost Marguerite the role.
And that Marguerite had known within a fortnight, from the director himself, exactly what had been said and by whom.
Eleven years.
Draft 27
Marguerite,
I have found out this week that you knew, within two weeks, what I said and that I said it. I had spent eleven years assuming the worst thing about that period was that you did not know.
I am sorry for what I did in 2013.
I am not going to explain it. If you would rather not hear from me again, you will not.
What she sent
Draft 26.
The four-sentence one. Without the paragraph about Ines.
She sat with it for four days and took it out, because the paragraph is information the recipient already has, and putting it in would be telling Marguerite something about herself in order to demonstrate that the sender has been suffering.
That is draft one. That is what draft one has been every time, in eleven years, in twenty-seven versions, and she finally recognised the shape of it.
The reply
It came eleven days later. Handwritten. Two lines.
I got it. Thank you for not explaining.
M.