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She woke up before her alarm in the morning, and sat down at the dining table with a stack of stationery. Her grandmother had given it to her in high school as a not-so-subtle hint to write more often. Esther had never used it; she’d sent her grandmother emails instead.
The stationery had strawberries around the edges of the page. She stared at them, squeezing the pen in her fingers. Paralyzed.
Just start. Just say something. Anything. The words didn’t have to be good, they just had to be true.
She started to write.
It had been years since Esther had handwritten a letter. Or even written more than a few words by hand. She had the handwriting of a third-grader.
Every word she scratched onto the page felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. Like it was being hauled up from the bottom of a deep, dark well. Like drawing blood from a stone. That’s how Jonathan had described writing once. She’d thought he was being overly dramatic, but now she understood. She was bleeding all over the paper, pouring her heart out to Jinny. Every drop was agony, but she pushed through, putting one word after the other.
Her hand started to ache by the end of the first page, but she kept going until she’d said everything she had to say. Until she’d bled herself dry. She’d filled six full pages by the time she was done.
It wasn’t poetry, but it was honest. More honest than she’d ever been, maybe.
Her hands shook as she read over it. Was she really going to send this to Jinny? What if she read it and decided Esther was crazy? What if it drove her even farther away?
Fuck it. Then at least she’d have tried, right? She’d have said what was in her heart, and if it wasn’t good enough, then it wasn’t. But she’d have done it.
She felt drained, but also accomplished. Lighter. Maybe there was something to be said for expressing your emotions after all.
It took five minutes of searching through every drawer in her apartment to find a stamp. She wrote Jinny’s address on the envelope, then deliberated for five minutes over whether to put a return address. What if Jinny saw it and threw it away unread? On the other hand, what if she assumed it was junk mail without a return address?
In the end, she elected to write her name and address in the top left corner. The whole point of this exercise was to be open and honest. No more deceptions. No more manipulations. If Jinny saw it was from her and didn’t want to read it, there was nothing Esther could do about that.
She stopped at the post office on her way to work and pulled her car alongside the drive-up mailbox. She almost got cold feet again as she held the letter over the gaping maw of the metal box. There were no take-backsies. Once she let go, it was gone. Out of her hands.
So what? Let it be out of her hands.
What did she have to lose? You can’t lose something you’ve already lost.
But maybe you can get it back again.
She dropped the letter in the slot and drove to work.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Esther figured it would take a few days for the letter to reach Jinny. In the meantime, she had a fence to mend at work.
“Hi,” she said to Yemi when she got to her desk that morning.
He looked up and nodded. “Hello.” Then he went back to work. That was what they did now. Offered the basic common courtesies and then went back to pretending they were strangers.
Esther sat down at her desk. After she’d put her stuff away, she spun around and kicked the bottom of his chair. “Hey.”
He swiveled to look at her, his expression one of polite yet guarded inquiry. “Yes?”
“I’m really sorry,” she said.
He blinked behind his thick-framed glasses. “For what?”
“For avoiding you last week.”
“Oh.” He nodded, shifting in his seat like he didn’t know what to do with that. “Okay. Thank you.”
“Are you mad at me?”
“I thought you were mad at me.”
