Geneva, July 21

Dear Benedict,

So how the hell are you? It’s incredibly complicated here. And the oddest thing. I can’t find the letter journal I’ve been keeping since I got here. It’s just a spiral notebook. I didn’t think I took it with me when I went to the park yesterday, but it wasn’t in the flat when I got back in the afternoon, and Anne says it wasn’t there when she and Victor came in during the middle of the day.

Maybe I’ve left it on some park bench or in some café. Or at the pool. I could swear it was either in my tote bag or on the table in the flat, and now it’s gone. Pages and pages and pages. I just can’t believe it. I hate losing things; I still pine for my grandmother’s Movado watch with lapis lazuli around the dial. She gave it to me for my twenty-first birthday, as my grandfather had given it to her for her twenty-first birthday, and I loved everything about it, can picture it still. It disappeared last year—I don’t even know quite when—and I searched through my apartment over and over. Perhaps it was swept into the trash by mistake. Perhaps it was stolen. Perhaps it fell off my wrist on the crosstown bus. I will never know. I want it back.

Where is my journal? The most obvious thought is that Anne has it, or has destroyed it, but though I suppose she would be capable of reading it, of taking it, even if she did do that, even if she tore it up page by page—which response she would certainly consider, if she read it, as I’ve been pretty blunt about all sorts of things—I can’t believe she would lie to me about it when I asked her.

I don’t trust Victor, for a variety of reasons, but his style would be different, somehow, I don’t know; maybe he would invite Anne and me out to a nice restaurant and then read it aloud at the table, in order to create a maximally uncomfortable atmosphere. Devious as he is, I can’t imagine him bothering with something like a notebook, actually.

I even find myself suspecting the old woman in the black dress who is perpetually scrubbing the hallway. She glares at me politely when I come in and out. I feel like pointing out to her that I’m not the one meeting my elderly married lover at lunchtime for a quickie. (The situation here is all in a kerfuffle, as I have said. Much to explain.) But seriously, even if she does have a key, what would she, or anyone else, want with my writing? My camera equipment has seemed more of a risk, and that’s untouched.

Well. I’m frustrated. Apologies for breaking the embargo. What you may have experienced as our agreed-upon thoughtful silence all month was in fact a din, a conflagration of words and thoughts, and even that rarest of commodities, feelings. I’ve been trying so hard to think and feel instead of act, for once. Nothing is really lost, I suppose. What’s gone missing is a marathon Harriet Rose arrogant commentary on the very odd situation here. It’s a mixture of blather and reflection, and though it was addressed to you, it’s really been a way of talking to myself. I’ve been using you as my You, Benedict; Anne Frank had her Dear Kitty. Have I been feeling that imprisoned here, I wonder?

I was writing about my work. And some stray thoughts about Us. And I had put into words some stories that might begin to explain me to you, a little. I have also expressed myself freely on the subject of Anne and Victor; I was wildly careless to leave the notebook around. Did I want them to find it, to read what I wrote? (But I have to trust Anne.) Paging Doctor Freud. (The man who put the Id in Yid, as my father used to say after every meeting with the school psychologist, who tried to talk to them about Adam.)

Things here are enormously complicated. I know I keep saying that. The famous Victor turns out to be a married cad. (Also a lot of other, more complicated things.) Anne is miserable, not herself. I’m in the middle of it all and have begun to feel quite desperate. My work is spotty. This is not the July it was supposed to be. How to begin? Certainly not at the beginning. And not now. Oh, Benedict.

With the promise of a better letter later—
And much, much love
HARRIET