“You were?”
“Yes.”
“Why did you keep them?”
“Because they are precious to me.”
I can’t make sense of those six words strung together like that. How could my letters be precious to him? How?
“You never wrote to me after you came home from the war,” I say.“I sent you all those letters after you left and you never wrote back. Not once.”
“That doesn’t mean your letters aren’t precious to me.”
My mind is whirling with confused thoughts. I want to reverse time and spin the earth back to before I had decided I meant nothing to him. Before he made me feel like I had meant nothing to him.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “You left. You wanted nothing to do with any of us. Youleft!”
“I know. I’m sorry. I was a broken man when I came home from thewar. I hated who I was, who I had become. I hated what I had seen and what I had done. I didn’t want to be here where life had been beautiful. When I was in France, everything I believed to be true was turned on its head. It was like waking up every morning in an upside-down world where everything that had been sacred had become profane. Every time a shell knocked me to the dirt or blew apart the man next to me or I aimed my gun and fired, I felt myself disappearing. Some of the other soldiers found a way to navigate the upside-down world. I never figured out how I was going to stay me. When I was shipped home, I didn’t know how to be the man I was before. That’s why I couldn’t stay here.”
I’m not aware that tears have gathered in my eyes until he reaches into his vest pocket and offers me a handkerchief.
I blot my eyes and I smell the closeness of his skin on the fabric. “I still don’t understand why you saved my letters.”
He leans forward and takes my hand. “Because every time you penned a letter to me, you wrote to the man I had been, the man you thought I still was. Every time I read or reread one of your letters, I was given a glimpse of the person I used to be. You made me believe I was still in there somewhere, past all the regret and the wounds and the self-loathing. There were many times I wanted to give up, times I wanted to point a gun to my head and just be done with it, but I’d see your letters in my rucksack and I’d find the will to live another day. All these years that I’ve been roaming about, doing odd jobs here and there and waiting to see if my world was ever going to turn right side up again, it was your letters that gave me the hope that one day it would. Your letters saved my life, Maggie. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. I’d be dead.”
“But... but I stopped writing.” My voice is tight in my throat and feels leaden. I do not feel like anyone’s savior.
“It didn’t matter. All those years that you did were enough for me. And after your letters stopped coming, I found myself wanting to live so that I could come home and show you that you hadn’t been a fool for writing a man who never wrote back.”
I was in love with you,my heart whispers.That is why I kept writing. And why I finally stopped.
He squeezes my hand before letting go. “I’m glad you came over, Maggie. I wanted to find the right time and place to tell you all this. I wish...” His voice falls away.
“You wish what?”
He smiles and shrugs. “I wish I had come home sooner.”
“I wish you had, too.”
For the first time ever, the eight years that separate Jamie and me seem like nothing more than a day. Unspoken words hang between us. He leans forward slightly, and I want to think it’s the posture of a man about to kiss the woman who saved his life.
And then Roland Sutcliff throws open the front door to the accounting office, jangling a bell to announce his entrance and breaking the spell.
