Chapter 6: The Letter
It was one page.
The handwriting was younger — steadier, less careful than the hand that had written *She will find out* on that folded note.
I read it slowly.
*Eleanor,*
*I don't know how to begin this, so I'll begin with the truth.*
*I met you and I knew immediately that you were someone I could love for the rest of my life.
That is not a small thing to know.
I have never known it before and I don't expect I will know it again.*
*But I can't stay.*
*Ruth is ill.
She has no family.
We were together before I met you — briefly, badly, in the way that young people are sometimes together — and I ended it, and I thought that was the end.
But she is carrying my child, and she is sick, and there is no one else.*
*I know what I am asking you to lose.
I know it because I am losing it too.*
*If I were a different man — a smaller man, maybe — I would tell you none of this and simply disappear.
But you deserve to know that it was not nothing.
That you were not nothing.
That if things had been different, I would have spent every year of my life trying to be worth the way you looked at me across that table.*
*I am not sending this letter.
I don't think I can.
If I send it, you might wait.
And I don't want that for you.
You should live, Eleanor.
Fully.
Without looking back.*
*But I needed to write it.
I needed you to exist somewhere on paper, in my handwriting, so that I could look at it and know that what happened between us was real.*
*It was real.*
*Thomas*
I set the letter down on the table.
The garden was visible through the back window.
Thomas was standing near the dahlias, his back to the house, his hands in his pockets.
Diane was watching me.
"He read it to me once," she said.
"When I was about thirty.
I'd asked him why he'd never remarried after my mother passed.
He didn't answer right away.
He went to his desk and came back with that envelope and he read it out loud." She paused.
"He didn't explain it.
He just read it and put it away again."
"That was his answer," I said.
"Yes," she said.
I looked at the letter again.
At my name at the top.
At *It was real* at the bottom.
"He said he didn't send it because he didn't want me to wait," I said.
"Yes."
"I waited anyway," I said.
"Not for him specifically.
But I never — " I stopped.
"I never found what we had in those six hours.
I looked.
I had a full life.
But I never found that again."
Diane was quiet.
"He didn't either," she said finally.
"In case you were wondering."
I folded the letter carefully and held it in both hands.
"Can I keep this?" I asked.
"It has your name on it," Diane said.
"It was always yours."
I stood up and walked to the back door.
Thomas heard it open.
He didn't turn around immediately.
When he did, his face was braced — the face of a man waiting to be told something difficult.
I held up the letter.
"You should have sent it," I said.
He looked at me for a long moment.
"I know."
"I would have waited," I said.
"You were right about that.
I would have waited."
"I know that too," he said.
"That's why I didn't send it."
I walked toward him across the garden.
The dahlias were very red in the morning light.
"It was real," I said.
"You were right about that part."
Something in his face broke open — not dramatically, not with tears, but in the quiet way that something long held finally releases.
His shoulders dropped slightly.
He exhaled.
"Yes," he said.
"It was."
We stood there in the garden, two old people in the morning light, and I thought about all the years between that bar where we first talked and this garden where we were standing now.
All the years that had been lived in the space of that unsent letter.
They weren't wasted years.
They were just years.
But this — this was something else.
"Ask me again," I said.
He looked at me.
"What you asked in the hospital," I said.
"Ask me again."
He was quiet for a moment.
Then: "Stay.
Please.
Stay here, with us, for whatever time there is."
"Yes," I said.
"All right."
He reached out and took my hand.
His grip was steady.
Behind us, through the kitchen window, I could see Diane standing at the counter with her back to us, very deliberately making coffee she didn't need.
Giving us the moment.
May you like
I squeezed Thomas's hand once.
He squeezed back.
