Chapter 7: What Comes After Yes
The letter arrived eleven days after I got home.
Proper stationery.
Cream-colored.
My name and address written in the same careful handwriting I recognized from the envelope in Malta.
Meg was visiting when it came through the door.
She watched me pick it up from the mat, look at the postmark — *Gozo* — and stand very still in the hallway for a moment.
"Is that from him?" she asked.
"Yes."
She waited.
I didn't open it immediately.
I carried it into the kitchen, put the kettle on, and set the envelope on the table between us.
"You're going to make me sit here and watch you not open it," she said.
"I'm building up to it."
"Mum."
"Meg."
She gave me the look she had inherited directly from her father — the one that said *I love you and you are being ridiculous* in equal measure.
I opened the letter.
It was two pages.
He wrote the way he talked — careful at first, then looser as he went, the sentences getting longer and less guarded as the pages went on.
He told me about going back to his flat in Gozo after I left.
About how Catherine had made him dinner and not asked too many questions, which he said was her highest form of kindness.
About the view from his window over the water, and how it looked different to him now, though he couldn't entirely explain why.
On the second page, near the bottom, he wrote:
*My friend in Ludlow has been asking me to visit since last spring.
I have been running out of reasons to say no.
I thought perhaps the second week of October, if that is not inconvenient.
I would not want to impose.
But I find I am tired of being careful about things that matter.*
I set the letter down.
Meg was watching me.
"Well?"
"He's coming to Ludlow in October."
She stared at me.
"Ludlow is twelve miles away."
"I know."
"Mum." She sat back in her chair.
"What are you going to do?"
"Write back," I said.
"And say what?"
I thought about it.
About the courtyard and the scarf and the seven hours and the letter and the long conversation while the harbor went dark and the sky slowly changed.
"I'm going to say October is fine," I said.
"And that Ludlow is a very nice town.
And that I know a good place for coffee."
Meg looked at me for a long moment.
Then her eyes went bright.
"Dad would have liked him," she said quietly.
I hadn't expected that.
My throat tightened.
"Why do you say that?"
"Because he wrote you a letter on proper stationery and he's nervous about imposing." She smiled.
"Dad was exactly like that."
I looked down at the two pages in my hand.
The careful handwriting.
The sentences that got braver as they went.
"Yes," I said.
"He was."
I wrote back that afternoon.
Two pages of my own.
I told him about Shropshire in October — the way the hills went rust and amber, the morning mist over the fields, the particular smell of woodsmoke that meant autumn had properly arrived.
I told him about my garden, which was overgrown in places I hadn't gotten around to yet.
I told him that the coffee place I had in mind was nothing fancy but the owner knew how to make a proper cup.
At the bottom, I wrote:
*The second week of October is not inconvenient at all.
I find I am also tired of being careful about things that matter.*
*— Eleanor*
I posted it on my way to the shops.
May you like
Stood at the postbox for just a moment after letting it go.
Then I went and bought groceries, came home, and spent the afternoon in the garden.
