Don’t answer that, I tell myself, and keep typing.
THREE
JESSICA
Ifind Coastal Quill’s letter waiting in the brass mailbox the next morning.
I’m not supposed to open them. The whole point of the Letters to Local Authors program is anonymity—readers and writers connecting through the safety of pen names and PO boxes. I’m just the facilitator, the person who collects the letters and makes sure they reach their destinations.
But Coastal Quill’s letters have become the exception to every rule I’ve ever made for myself.
I carry the envelope to my apartment upstairs, Austen trailing behind me like he’s supervising a decision he knows I’m going to regret. The morning light filters through my windows, making dust motes dance above my reading chair—the comfortable disaster of books stacked on every surface, mismatched furniture that I’ve collected over years of thrift store hunting, and the persistent smell of old paper that no amount of vanilla candles can quite cover.
This is my space. The place where I don’t have to be the cheerful bookstore owner or the responsible business woman or the woman who’s definitely not falling apart over a sixty-day eviction notice disguised as a rent increase.
Here, I can just be Jessica.
I curl up in my reading chair, Austen immediately claiming my lap, and open the envelope.
Dear Between the Lines,
I’ve been thinking about your question from our last exchange. You asked how someone knows which version of themselves is real when they’ve spent years performing different roles for different audiences.
I think the answer is: you are most yourself when you’re most afraid. When the masks slip and the walls crack and there’s nothing between you and the truth except your own cowardice.
You said scared hearts build walls. I’ve built so many I’m not sure I remember what I was protecting anymore. Maybe just the fear itself or the idea that if no one really sees me, they can’t find me wanting.
But then you said walls can come down. And I wonder: what if coming down means collapsing? What if the structure I’ve built is the only thing holding me upright?
What if the person I’m falling for could never forgive who I really am?
The author you mentioned—the one who lost his way—I think he’s terrified that being brave enough to write honestly means losing the one reader whose opinion matters most. That vulnerability isn’t strength. It’s just another way to get hurt.
How do you convince someone that the risk is worth it?
Yours in perpetual uncertainty (and maybe something like hope),
Coastal Quill
There’s something about the way he writes—raw and vulnerable and terrified—that makes me want to reach through the page and tell this stranger that he’s not alone. That I understand building walls so high you forget the view from thetop. That I know what it feels like to perform a version of yourself until you’re not sure which parts are real anymore.
My heart aches for him. For this anonymous writer who’s falling for someone while hiding behind his own carefully constructed persona.
I wonder what she’s like, the woman he’s falling for. Does she know? And does she feels the same way?
“He’s in love,” I tell Austen, who responds with the feline equivalent of “obviously, and you’re an idiot for caring about someone else’s love life when your own is a disaster.”
Fair point.
I should let Caroline mail this letter and get back to the actual disaster of my life. I have a bookstore to save, inventory to organize, and approximately fifty-nine days to figure out how to either afford a forty percent rent increase or find a new location for The Fiction Nook.
Instead, I pull out my favorite stationery—the cream-colored cards with tiny books embossed in the corners that Michelle gave me last Christmas—and write the letter.
I stare at what I’ve written, feeling exposed. I just confessed things to a stranger I’ve barely admitted to myself. Things about Richard and feeling not enough and being scared of my own dreams.
But that’s the thing about Coastal Quill’s letters. They make me feel safe enough to be honest and to drop my own walls and admit the truth underneath.
I seal the envelope before I can second-guess myself and set it aside to drop in the outgoing mail.
