‘It’s for you.’ Madeleine carefully placed the small offering in the palm of Hazel’s hand. Madeleine was beaming. There was no other word for it. A scarf covered her bald head, her eyebrows were inexpertly penciled in so she looked a little astonished. A slight bluish tinge under her eyes spoke of a tired that went beyond sleepless nights. But despite all that, Mad had beamed. And her extraordinary delight filled the drab room.
They hadn’t seen each other in twenty years and while Hazel remembered each and every moment of their young friendship, she’d somehow forgotten how alive she’d felt around Madeleine. She looked down at her palm. The thing wasn’t a bone, but a note, all rolled up.
‘It was still in the sofa,’ said Madeleine. ‘Imagine that. After all these years. Waiting for us, I guess. Waiting for this moment.’
Madeleine seemed to carry magic with her, Hazel remembered. And where there was magic there were miracles.
‘Where’d you find this?’
‘Back there.’ Mad waved her hand behind the sofa. ‘Once, when you were in the bathroom, I slipped it into a little hole.’
‘A little hole?’
‘A little hole made by a little pen,’ Madeleine’s eyes sparkled as she mimicked digging and twisting a pen into the sofa, and Hazel found herself laughing. She could just see the girl tunneling away at her parents’ prized possession. Madeleine was fearless. While Hazel had been the school hall monitor, Madeleine had been the one trying to sneak into class late, after grabbing a smoke in the woods.
Hazel looked down at the tiny white cylinder in her palm, unsullied by exposure to sunlight and life, swallowed by the sofa to be coughed up decades later.
Then she opened it. And she knew she’d had reason to be afraid of the thing. For what it contained changed her life immediately and forever. Written in round, exuberant purple ink was a single simple sentence.
I love you.
Hazel couldn’t meet Madeleine’s eyes. Instead she looked up from the tiny note and noticed that her living room, which that morning had been so drab, was now warm and comfortable, the washed-out colors vibrant. By the time her eyes returned to Madeleine the miracle had happened. One had become two.
Madeleine went back to Montreal to finish her treatments, but as soon as she could she returned to the cottage in the countryside, surrounded by rolling hills and forests and fields of spring flowers. Madeleine had found a home and so had Hazel.