The following letters are selected from the archives of material donated to the library as part of the estate of noted author and adventurer Captain John H. Watson, M.D. (hons), Ph.D. (h.c.) The originals are handwritten and undated, thus the ordering has been chosen based upon textual and other cues within the m.s. Itself.

Mary-

I am writing this under duress. Because that miserable prick Sherlock broke into our flat and said, "John, I take my responsibility as your friend and Rosamund's godfather seriously, and as such, I must tell you that I am concerned for your wellbeing."

And after a lot more shit like that including some actual threats I got hauled back to another fucking therapist and got another fucking psych diagnosis (traumatic grief, if you were wondering) and another fucking stupid writing assignment.

So here we go: let's send a mash note to my dead wife. I'm sure that'll make me feel much better.

Sherlock took my bloody gun. And our friends stay over in a rota to make sure I don't off myself, not that I would. I have Rosie to think of. I'm not like you, I wouldn't ever leave her that way. You selfish bitch.

She keeps fucking crying for you and I don't know what to do, she's too little to understand things like "forever" and-

The hell with this.

I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. It should have been Sherlock.

It should have been me.

I dreamed about you last night. You had on your purple dress and you were sitting in the restaurant we liked and you explained to me that it was all, obviously, just a trick. I forced myself to wake up.

Because I know, I know that that doesn't happen. The people who die don't come back to us. But there's this little part of my brain that keeps whispering, "Well, if it happened once..."

If it could happen again. Please, please. If I could get one more miracle.

Dear Mary-

I'm trying this again. The life insurance policy we got when Rosie was born finally paid out today… the cheap bastards took forever to investigate it, given the terrible circumstances of your death. And when I opened it up and saw the cheque I immediately thought I should text you to tell you, that you'd be happy that we could pay off the mortgage, put some money away for Rosie to go to university someday.

About three times a day I think of something I'd like to tell you. And every time there's that "Oh" moment right afterwards. I don't know when that's going to stop.

Things are… better, I suppose. I don't feel like I'm living in a horror movie anymore. I don't really feel much of anything, honestly. Everything is grey, including this city. I've thought about moving, but you're not supposed to make decisions like that in the first year, and I don't want to disrupt Rosie's life any more than it has been already.

She's getting so big now. She's started to stretch out and she looks like a toddler, not a baby anymore. She has a bunch of words, and she can say a few little sentences like "want cup" and "Wosie up." Sometimes she sort of cocks her head and looks at me and when she does that she looks so much like you it's actually physically painful.

I was jealous of her, though I didn't really realize it at the time. It's petty and terrible but I was. I'd just found my way back to you and then she was born and all of a sudden I felt like I was alone on the outside of this little circle of mother and child, and I made a terrible mistake.

Did you know about that? I hope you didn't. I hope that your last months weren't tainted with that. It wasn't as bad as it could have been, but it was enough. And now Rosie's all I've got left of you and I have to live with myself.

Guilt on top of grief's one hell of a thing. Would you forgive me, if you knew? If I could ask you to your face instead of writing these letters to nobody?

I don't forgive myself.

Yours,
John

Dear Mary-

Rosie and I went to Baker Street and spent the afternoon there today. I bet you'd have been happy about that.

It's not the same, anymore. Detective work is over for me: I'm a single parent now and I can't afford to take those sorts of risks. And honestly I think Sherlock's considering hanging up the hat himself. He talked about his cases but none of them really seemed to capture his attention. A lot of the heart went out of him when you died.

But it was good. The bastard has been my best friend for the better part of a decade and you can't hang on to blame forever. He shouldn't have provoked the woman with the gun. I should have gotten there first. You shouldn't have leapt in front of a bloody bullet.

None of us wanted any of this to happen. But here we are.

He doesn't like to talk about you, but he got misty when he was playing with Rosie… which, speaking of, he literally went out and spent two hundred pounds and bought her a chemistry set. I pointed him to the "Ages 8+" on the box and he said "Well, surely that's more of a guideline than an actual rule. And there's no enforcement mechanism in place." But I played the bad guy and put my foot down because she's still too young for hydrochloric acid, so she spent the afternoon making snakes out of clay while he and I grew silver crystals on a copper wire.

It was almost like old times, except of course for the missing person at the heart of it.

I keep thinking it's going to stop hurting, eventually. You know how many people I've loved who have died? And I've always been able to put it behind me, sooner or later. But it's been two years now and it still fucking hurts, every day.

I love you,

Still,

Yours,

John

I dreamed about you last night. And in this dream we were back in Morocco and you were sitting in my lap and kissing me.

All we did in my dream was kiss, though that night we did more. If I'd known then that it would be the last time together. If I hadn't been feeling guilty, even then. I'd have paid more attention, made more of an effort… because now I don't really actually remember it. It's just a blurred compilation of the thousand other times we were together. Two bodies, seeking comfort in the dark.

But in my dream you were warm and I could smell your perfume and you kissed me like you loved me. I didn't want to wake up and have it end. But I did, in an empty bed.

My dear Mary,

I just got back from the funeral. I took Rosie, kind of against my better judgement, because the bloody books all say that you should respect the child's wishes about these things and let them decide how much they want to engage with the process, and she said she wanted to go. It was closed casket, so I didn't think it'd be too distressing.

She was a champ throughout the actual service but in the car on the way home she had an absolute hysterical meltdown, and kept repeating, "She's never going to come back! She's never going to come back!"

Father of the bloody year material, I am. I pulled over to the side of the road and took her out of her carseat and let her cry it out in my lap, until she hiccuped herself to sleep.

I cried too. I'm crying now.

It wasn't like with you… it was sad, but not tragic. She had all the long years you never got, and she just went to sleep one night and never woke up. It's how I'd like to go, someday. But as far as I can tell Rosie has no memory of your death and so this was like the first time for her.

She left the house at Baker Street to Sherlock, obviously. I got all of her jewelry, to hold in trust for when Rosie is old enough to wear it. Some of it's really nice. It's all sorted into custom-made boxes, and as I went through them I noticed there was a missing space.

It was those earrings, the ones she basically forced you to take because you made the mistake of admiring them where she could hear you. I got your jewelry box out of the attic and took them out, and put them back with the rest of her collection. There's a necklace and a bracelet that go along with them. Maybe someday Rosie will wear them and get to remember you both.

She was such a good woman, the nearest Rosie came to a grandmother, and a second mother to all the rest of us. She got herself out of a life she hated and built a new and better one. And now she's never coming back.

If you could come back to me, to us, I would do anything at all to make that happen. I'd harrow hell like Orpheus for Eurydice.

Rosie's awake, and she's calmed down now, enough to start agitating for ice cream. I think we're going to do that.

Good night, my darling,

Yours,

John

Dear Mary,

It's a quiet autumn night here. I was-

Okay, hold on. Rosie wants to write something. Here she goes:

(The handwriting changes here from black ink in Palmer-method cursive to red marker in the blocky print of a small child)

Dear Mume

I love you I hope you like it in hevin I drew this picture of you

Love Rosie

(Said picture is of three figures, all with impossibly long legs and large eyes. The largest one has grey hair and is labeled "Daddy," the smallest one has yellow hair and is labeled "Rosie," and the medium sized one has long brown hair and is labeled "Mume." The Palmer-method cursive resumes.)

Shit, shit, shit.

The thing you're supposed to do with a child to help them adjust to the loss of a parent is to maintain a space where they can feel free to talk about it and come to their own conclusions. And so every bloody day I talk to her about you. Just enough that she knows it's not a secret and that she doesn't have to hide her feelings about it from me.

But I haven't looked at your photos with her in months now and, well…

I don't know who she's thinking of, in that drawing. Based on the hair I'd say Janine or Molly. They were both around a lot back then, Molly especially. Even though she's off in Sussex now she still visits and skypes with Rosie a lot.

She does remember you, at least a little bit. I asked her about that tonight, and she thought about it for a minute and said, "Mummy said not to hurt the spider."

And my jaw literally dropped because I had completely forgotten about you and the bloody spiders. You would never let me swat them. You'd always trap them under a glass and take them outside.

You said, once, "There's a difference between 'can kill' and 'should kill.' I'm clear on that one now."

That's a good thing for her to remember about you, isn't it? Kindness?

Though seriously, woman. Spiders.

Rosie made me completely forget what I was going to write about, tonight. So what else do I have to tell you? The 'hevin' bit? Yeah, even after rowing with you about whether we'd get her baptized and whether we'd raise her religious, it turns out that when your beautiful daughter asked me, swimmy eyed, where you are, I lied like a fucking rug.

And hell, maybe I'm wrong about this being all there is to it. We go down to the little church in our neighborhood from time to time. She likes to play in their playground. And I've prayed for you. Even if I don't have faith I figure it can't hurt. Maybe somewhere you're actually reading these letters.

I'm not sure if that idea makes it better or worse.

She's so bloody brilliant, Mary, and it kills me that you aren't here to see it. She asked me how to spell 'picture' but the rest of that she did all on her own. She's the best writer in her class, and she's always emailing everyone little stories and letters.

Yes, we give kids that age email addresses now. We live in the future.

I think she gets that, the writing, from me. I've been writing again myself… fiction, this time. It may actually be a novel, though it's still coming to me. It's a good yarn, I think, a Victorian detective story. I've got a lot of raw material to use though obviously I have to change the details around. I gave one of Anderson's lines to the genius detective character. The actual genius detective read over that chapter for me and I thought he was going to murder me with a toasting fork. It was great.

I don't know exactly what Rosie gets from you. Some of it's obvious… her fine bones, her big eyes. But I never knew you when you were young, and there's nobody I can ask what you were good at in school.

I have to look for the other stuff. She's got your kindness, anyway. And your courage.

As a legacy, I don't think you could do much better.

Sleep well, my dearest,

Yours,

John

My Mary-

It's been a long time since I've written one of these. And the reason for not writing and the reason for writing now are the same.

I've met someone.

I think you'd like her, actually. She's funny, and smart. And I think you wouldn't want me to be alone forever, though… I truly don't know. You could be possessive of what was yours.

And I was so yours. Mind, body, heart, soul.

But Rosie needs a mum. No, that's not true, though Gemma will be a good stepmum. She's got two girls of her own, thirteen and seventeen. All of them get along really well. What Rosie needs is you, and the rest of the mum stuff can be handled by anybody, including me. I've got this "single parent of a daughter" thing down to a science, now. I can make three separate types of plaits and I've already got the menstruation talk queued up for… sometime next year, probably. I want to get it out of the way before she's likely to need it.

I need somebody. And so I joined a "Parents without Partners" meetup group and went out to do just that.

It's not like it was, with you. There's an element of calculation to the whole thing that I'm not entirely happy with. I need someone to help me get through life. And she had been a stay-at-home mum for fifteen years when her husband died and they've been scratching ever since. She needs someone with money, which is, actually, me now. "A Study in Scarlet" stayed on the bestseller lists for twelve weeks. I've got a three-book contract to follow it up.

Neither of us are going into this with any illusions it's a grand love story. But we get on well and I think it'll be happy enough.

This is going to be the last one of these I will write. Gemma deserves for me to freely give whatever of my heart I have left.

So here's the truth. Let the record show that when John Hamish Watson married Mary Elisabeth Watson, nee Morstan, nee Rosamund… it was because he couldn't bear not to. And even though I've been your widower far longer than I was your husband, even knowing how it would turn out-

I would do it all again tomorrow.

I'll write you into a love story. Sharing your life was the greatest privilege I will ever get. I was so broken when you found me and I don't know why you bothered putting me back together but thank you for it. Thank you for my life. Thank you for my daughter.

Forgive me for all the wrongs I ever did you. I forgive you, absolutely and completely.

I dreamed of you last night. This time I wasn't even in the dream. You were walking on the beach and the wind was blowing your hair and you were smiling. I wish you would talk to me when I dream of you, but you seemed… happy.

If you are anywhere, be happy. Please. I'll try to be happy too.

Always,

Yours,

John