But

this is the version of the archives (the scraps of paper, the lists of births and deaths, the history books and silence), that is a novel.

And so

(let me tell you)

Having taken a new name, living in the south of a continent spanning half the side of the planet Clitemnestra marries a man who will take her to England.

For ten years she had been living, repairing, getting older. Before that – those had been the freest days. Before. Where nobody knew her. Where she could spend a day kneeling in the earth, with purpose, hitting the road again life on her back like a cowboy.

And she might have stayed living that way. But she was lonely and on some nights she had bad dreams and on some nights she couldn’t sleep and on some nights she made herself come quiet and almost without moving in her bed just to get herself to stop thinking words. On some nights she felt that her heart was rotting, unsolid, its muscle unfleshing unpeeling. She felt a nothingness ahead of her like a road, this grief the size of a life. She writes a letter and for years she waits for a response.