Nine Letters

She read them at the kitchen table while her mother slept.

She had meant to read them carefully, one at a time, the way you're supposed to do something important. She read the first one twice. Then she couldn't stop, and she read straight through all nine with her hands wrapped around a cold cup of tea, the house quiet around her, the kind of silence that comes at two in the morning when even the street noise has stopped.

The letters weren't what she'd expected.

She'd expected longing — the full romantic weight of eleven years, everything she'd been afraid of. But they weren't that. They were just Marcus: factual in the way he was always factual, careful in the way he was always careful. The fourth letter mentioned the bookshop, still hypothetical then, something he was thinking about. The fifth mentioned a woman named Iris, serious for six months and then not, described with the same plain fairness he'd have given anything else. The seventh letter started with a line about the weather and spent three paragraphs on a book he'd read that she would have liked, she would have argued with him about the ending, he'd been saving the argument for a long time.

The eighth letter was shorter than the others. He'd been offered a position in the city — good money, better prospects, the kind of thing you were supposed to want. He'd turned it down. He didn't explain why. He didn't have to.

The ninth letter — dated three months ago, the newest paper, the ink still dark — was the one that undid her.

"I don't think I write these for you anymore," it began. "Or not entirely. I think I write them so I don't forget who I am when you're not here. You always made me more precise. I'd say something and you'd look at me until I found the right word. I haven't had anyone do that in eleven years and I notice it every day."

"I'm not asking you to come back. I just wanted you to know you are still, in some form, present."

She sat with that for a long time.

Outside the window the sky was getting lighter — not dawn yet, but the deep blue that comes just before it. The maple on the front lawn was a dark shape against it, beginning to show the earliest edge of leaf.

She thought about the eleven years. She thought about the city and the career and the person she'd become there, efficient and forward-moving, and she thought about the drive back to Millhaven and the way her throat had tightened when the steeple appeared in the fog.

She stacked the letters back in order.

She got up. She found paper in the kitchen drawer — her mother's stationery, cream-colored, the kind used for thank-you notes. She sat back down.

She had eleven years to account for.

She picked up the pen.

She started writing.