“Hmm?”
“Thank you for giving me today. Before we go to Peachvale tomorrow, I mean.”
His hand tightens on mine. “It means as much to me as it does you…maybe more. There’s something—being with you—itjust feels so damn right, you know? Like I’m finally…settled after spending years trying to climb out of my skin because I never truly fit anywhere.”
Where are the dang tissues when you need them? “I—I need to tell you something. About the letters.” Guilt makes my tone tight.
He stops walking, glances over my head, to the side, then leads me to an empty park bench. “What is it?”
I take a breath. “You know I’ve been writing to you. To the PO box, for years.”
He nods, scanning my face, then sits up taller, as if he’s preparing himself for bad news.
“It’s a lot of letters, Valen. Like…a lot. At first, I was so sure you were coming for me that I wrote to you weekly, then monthly. Then, when my heart started to break, there were some…angry ones.” I cringe and focus on how he holds my hand instead of his face. “After my anger wore off, I only wrote for holidays and major life milestones. But…there might be one or two giant FUs in there too.” I scrunch up my nose, remembering the pain of my angry days.
He remains unnaturally still. “What do you mean?”
“When Miriam smuggled me out of New Hampshire, she gave me that address. I don’t know if she knew what happened to you, but when we left, it was in a hurry. She told me if I didn’t hear from you, not to lose hope, to always write, and you’d get them…eventually.”
“Clover,” he croaks, but still, I can’t look directly at him.
“That’s all the information I had to go on, so I did. I wrote about my life. About college. About moving to Happiness because it’s what I was searching for in life. I wrote about my books.” My voice wobbles. “I wrote about missing you.”
“I didn’t know,” he says quietly, as though it pains him as much as it did me.
“I know that now. And somehow, I knew you weren’t getting them, but I kept writing anyway. It felt—” I search for the right phrasing. “It felt like keeping you close. Like you were still out there somewhere, you know?”
“You kept writing even though you thought I’d ghosted you?”
I nod, then wipe an errant tear. The sun is setting, and the chill of a New England fall is beginning to seep into my bones.
“It was…therapeutic, and it made me feel less alone in the world. But then, you started writing back. Well, I mean, I thought it was you. The handwriting was so close to what I remembered.”
I pull out my phone and show him some photos of his supposed letters.
“Poems, sonnets. Beautiful words that—” I bite my lip, centering myself. “Poetry didn’t fit the boy I remembered, but the words in them, they did.” I swipe at my cheek again. “Or maybe I just wanted you so desperately that I made this nonsense fit the boy I thought I knew.”
“Wait.” Valen takes my phone and zooms in on an image. “This isn’t my handwriting.” He squints and draws the screen closer. “These are the letters you gave Roman?”
I nod.
“It’s close,” he says. “Really close to my handwriting, but I had to relearn how to do some things when I woke up in the hospital. Writing, fine motor skills were among them. I never quite mastered the curve at the bottom of the letter S, not like I did as a kid. Someone studied a sample of my childhood writing and copied it.” His jaw tightens. “Someone had access to things I wrote before I was attacked.”
“It makes sense,” I say, while he stares at the image of a handwritten poem on cream-colored paper. “We have no idea when someone found your journals. They could have been practicing your handwriting for years, for all we know.”
He pulls me into his arms right there on Main Street.
“I wanted them to be real so badly, I never looked deeper into the handwriting,” I admit.
“I’m sorry,” he murmurs into my hair. “I’m so fucking sorry for everything.”
“It’s not your fault.” I sniffle. “Someone has been getting my letters, Valen. Reading personal things, stuff I never shared with anyone else. How long have they been invading my privacy? And why wait this long to come after me? After all this time?”
“We’ll find out,” he says. Another promise I wish I could believe in. “We’ll go to the post office tomorrow and start piecing this entire shit show together.”
“What if it’s—” I can’t say it. I’m not sure how many betrayals I can withstand.
“What if it’s what?”
