What He Didn't Write

His house was the one she remembered from seventeen — the old farmhouse at the edge of town, though it had been repainted and the porch rebuilt and there were bookshelves visible through the front window that hadn't been there before. She stood on the new porch boards for a moment before she knocked.

He had made pasta, which was not what she'd expected from a man who'd written ten letters across eleven years. She'd imagined something more deliberate. He had made pasta and opened a bottle of red he'd been saving since a trip to a vineyard in France three years ago.

"The sixth letter," she said, when they were halfway through the meal. "You mentioned a trip but didn't say where. France?"

"Burgundy." He poured more wine. "I went alone. I had this idea that I was going to write you a letter from there, which I did, and then I burned it."

She looked at him. "You burned one?"

"I burned three, actually. Early on." He set the bottle down. "The ones where I was angry."

She hadn't thought about angry. She'd read ten letters of careful precision and assumed precision was all there was.

"What were you angry about?" she asked, though she already knew.

"You left without a word," he said. "Not a note, not a call. I went to your house and your mother said you'd gone. You were just — gone." He said it without accusation, the way you describe a fact you've made peace with. "It took me two years to get to letters. Before that there was just — the other thing."

She set down her fork. "I didn't know how to say goodbye."

"I know."

"I thought if I said goodbye I would stay."

"I know that too." He looked at her steadily. "You thought staying would ruin you. That Millhaven was the thing you had to escape to become who you needed to be." He paused. "And you were right. I knew it then. I was still angry."

Clara looked at the wine in her glass, the deep color of it.

"I was also right that you'd come back," he said, "eventually. I just thought it would be sooner."

"I nearly came back at twenty-five," she said. It came out before she'd decided to say it. "I had a bad year. There was a — it doesn't matter. I drove as far as the motorway junction and then I turned around."

He was very still.

"Why?" he said.

"Because I didn't know if you'd moved on," she said. "And I was more afraid of finding out you had than of never knowing."

The kitchen was quiet. Outside, the last light was going.

"Iris," he said, after a moment. "The fifth letter. I wanted you to know."

"I know."

"I was trying not to wait," he said. "I want you to understand that. I wasn't preserving myself for you. I was trying to live."

"I know," she said. "Marcus." She looked at him. "That's not the part I'm afraid of."

"Then what is?"

She opened her mouth. Closed it.

Her phone buzzed on the table. Alcott again. She turned it face down.

"Thursday," she said.

He looked at the face-down phone for a moment. Then he refilled her glass.

"Tell me about the bad year at twenty-five," he said.

So she did.