Every Day in May (grand prize winner) ✔

May 9th

My name is Merryn. 

If you care about my wellbeing at all, you'll make sure that this note in particular is not discovered. I'm serious. If your father were to read it, he'll know from the first line who I am.

Why did you ask me this? Was it purely curiosity or something more? I feel like you were hoping that in the six years I spent visiting your mother, she would have mentioned me to you. But she didn't.  How could she keep the presence of another child in the Tower from her own lonely son?  She told me all about you while you hadn't a clue about me. It doesn't seem fair.

Please don't judge your mother for keeping her secrets, Theo. She is a kind woman with a sad life. You are all she has now. I can't stand the thought that you would be angry with her because of everything I'm revealing to you.  She has only ever acted out of love for you.  Besides, without her I wouldn't know about the scar you got falling out of a tree or the lullabies you heard as a baby or that scowl she loves to chastise you for. 

Every week she spoke of you while we dined on biscuits and marzipan. She brought you to life for me as we sipped our sweetened tea.  I was the only one she ever confided in. "In a different life," she used to say, "you and Theo would be the best of friends, but in this one, there is nothing but tragedy." This perpetual tragedy was like a tornado, with your father sitting calmly in its eye.  

He surprised your mother greatly when he allowed her to invite me to tea. I don't know what that says about their relationship, but I do know that that meager show of tolerance did not last.

By the time I was sixteen, I looked forward to our visits as much as your mother did. She filled a place in my heart that had been absent since I was nine.  Your mother loved to talk about you; especially your art, how you mixed colors, made them swirl to life on the canvas, as if conjuring the world into being with every stroke, bringing it to you because you could not go to it. 

It was around this time that your father became suspicious.  Even though we gave him no reason to distrust us, he did.  Your father has always been paranoid.  He needed no just cause to accuse us of wrongdoing.

Visiting with your mother had a condition: under no circumstances were you and I to cross paths.  I would be allowed to come only when you were on another floor busy studying under the watchful eye of your teacher.  It goes without saying that I was never to be informed of your existence, and that your mother was never to mention me to you.

Your father began attending our weekly teas.  Each time he joined us, my fear grew.  I agonized over the possibility that he'd somehow guessed I knew about you.  On the very last visit I had with your mother, he had just sat down with us when an advisor called him away to deal with a pressing matter.  His eyes narrowed and he settled a look of warning upon his wife before slipping out of the room.

"Merryn," your mother whispered to me after she'd checked that no one was lurking outside the door, "you have to stop coming here."

This was the last thing I wanted to hear but I knew she was right.  I was worried for my safety as well as for hers.  If the Leader had it in his head that I was a traitor, if he had me arrested and executed, what would happen to your mother?

"My husband may try to keep you here." She led me to a room, one of the many rooms of the Tower that used to serve a grander purpose but now was filled with dusty furniture and old trinkets.  There, she showed me a hidden door (before I continue, Theo, please never try to find that door.  If I were you, I'd want to badly, but I'm begging you not to.  If you're caught searching for it—if it led to your father finding it—you can forget about these notes).

"When I first came here, I spent weeks exploring the Tower."  She slid open the door and stared into the darkness.  "I thought many times about taking these steps, following them all the way to their end, and never looking back."

"Why didn't you?"

She shook her head.  "Theo.  Theo came along and his father locked him away.  I couldn't leave my son, and if I attempted to escape with him, surely we would be hunted down.  Who knows what he would do even to his own child in his attempt to take back what he felt belonged to him? And even if we did get away, where would we go?  How would I keep him safe?  I didn't want my own selfishness to lead to my son's death."

Francesca told me this passage led to a cave facing the eastern cove below were the Tower is perched—it was accessible but well hidden from the beach.

"This is your way out.  My husband is on edge today.  I fear if you tried leaving as you usually do, you'd be detained and questioned."

"But, won't he wonder why I'm gone?"

"I'll tell him you left early because you have exams.  If he questions the guards, he will assume they missed you passing through the gates.  They may get unfairly reprimanded, but I don't think it will go beyond that.  Most of his attention lately has been on the unrest in the Western Province.  As long as you don't return here, I don't believe he'll bother with you anymore."

"Francesca, please!  Don't make me leave you like this."  A horrible thought had just occurred to me.  "He might think you're to blame, that we're conspiring together or something.  You know how his mind works."

"I'll be fine, Merryn, but only if you go now."  She urged me forward, handing me a lantern.  "Take the passage.  Take it and don't come back." 

Tears fell as they had at the CULL Day celebration when she'd spotted me among the choir girls.  She cried, just as she had at our first meeting when the weight of the Tower seemed to press upon her shoulders.  I did as she wished; I fled down the stone steps, tears of my own blurred the shadowy outlines of the passage, all the while hoping that doing so would ease her burden once again.