“I want you to go to the cottage.”
“Tonight?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s something there you need to see.”
I almost smiled despite myself.
“You’ve been waiting forty years to become mysterious?”
A weak laugh escaped him.
“I was always mysterious.”
“You were terrible at it.”
“I know.”
The moment softened, but only briefly.
“What am I going to find?”
He looked at the wooden box.
“Your letters.”
I stared at him.
“What letters?”
“The ones I wrote after I left.”
“I never received any.”
“No. My mother kept them.”
“Why?”
“She said she was protecting us.”
“From what?”
“From the possibility that we might still choose each other.”
The answer broke something open inside me—not dramatically, not all at once, but like a door that had swollen shut over years and finally yielded beneath gentle pressure.
“How many letters?”
“All of them.”
“How many?”
“Thirty-seven.”
