She stares at the stack, then lifts her eyes to mine. Her brows knit together, disbelief warring with recognition. Her fingers linger on the twine as though the knot itself might burn her skin,but at last, she tugs it loose. One by one, she draws the envelopes into her lap, her hands trembling, her eyes shining with tears that cling stubbornly to her lashes. And then, her voice breaks the silence, rough and fractured.
“You wrote to me? All these years? You never stopped. There must be fifty letters here.”
“I did,” I exhale, the confession tearing free like something long caged. My nerves are frayed to the breaking point. How do I tell her I never let her go, never stopped thinking of her, without sounding utterly mad? Still, she needs to hear it, so I force the truth into the open. “I didn’t stop. I kept sending them, praying that maybe the next one would find its way to you.”
She flips through the pile, pausing on one envelope, her lips parting in disbelief. “This one’s from last June.”
I nod, throat tight. “I told myself if I stopped, I might lose the one chance I had to reach you, hoping someday you would open one and not send it back. And I couldn’t…I couldn’t let go of that hope.”
She stares down at the letter for a long, aching moment, her shoulders trembling before a tear slips free and splashes onto the paper in her lap. Instinct overrides thought, and I reach for her, my hand finding the curve of her cheek. My thumb brushes away the tear clinging there, and she leans into the touch as though she has been waiting years for it, aching for it. The weight of everything we lost hangs heavy in that single, fragile contact.
“Why?” Her voice breaks as she lifts her gaze, eyes shimmering. “Why did you hold on to hope?”
I swallow hard, the words rough as they leave me. “Because I never forgot that summer. I never forgotyou, Firefly.”
Tears spill faster, her breath catching in sharp, uneven pulls. I spread my palm against her cheek, grounding her, refusing to let go.
“I needed a way to keep you close,” I whisper. “Even when the letters came back unopened, even when silence was all I got in return, writing to you was the only way I knew to survive. It was how I carried you with me. How I survived the silence.”
“I never saw any of these.” Clara’s voice waivers as she speaks. “They never gave them to me. They kept them from me.”
A cold prickle climbs my spine. “What do you mean? You didn’t send them back?”
She shakes her head, disbelief widening her eyes, anger beginning to flicker beneath the sorrow. “No. This was my parents’ address for years. They had to have gotten them, but I never received a single one. Not one letter, Marcel.”
Grace draws in a sharp breath, pulling her cardigan tight around her shoulders. “Eli, it’s freezing in here all of a sudden.”
Eli’s gaze never leaves Clara. “Seems your great-grandparents didn’t think she needed to read Marcel’s letters. They were all sent back to him. She’s feeling everything all at once now.”
“That’s heartbreaking,” Grace whispers, her eyes fixed near Clara but not quite landing on her, as though even she can sense the weight in the air.
Clara’s tears fall harder now, but there’s fire in them. She rises from her chair, the letters placed on the table, her hands trembling at her sides. “I was never allowed to choose,” she says, her voice low and bitter. “My life, my feelings, none of it ever mattered. I was expected to be perfect. Compliant. Proper. My happiness was always an afterthought.”
Something inside me splinters at her words. The helplessness in her, the years of it, breaks something open in me that I can’t bear to hold.
“Clara…” I stand to reach for her, “I’m so sorry. But you had a beautiful life, didn’t you? I saw the wedding announcement in the Cheyenne paper. You looked happy.”
Her laugh is sharp, bitter—nothing like the sound I used to know. She backs away like my words struck her. “Happy?” she whispers. “You thought I looked happy?”
She begins to pace, her arms folding tight across her chest, her breath shaking. “I was carrying your child, Marcel.” Her voice cracks, softer now. “On my wedding day, I took another man’s name with your child alive inside me. And I smiled through every photograph, said vows I didn’t mean, and made a good man believe a lie because it was the only way I believed I could survive what I had done.”
She pauses, eyes meeting mine, glassy with grief. “You think I wanted that life? Every part of me wanted to run, to come back here to you. But I was terrified. Of what people would say. What it would do to you, to my family, to the Hayes. I was so afraid of the ruin I’d bring if I followed my heart.”
The tears finally fall. “So I stayed. And I’ve carried the ache of that choice every day since.”
The Ride
Clara 1923
The sun hangs high,unrelenting in the late-afternoon sky, spilling golden heat across Devil's Ridge Ranch. The scent of warm wild grass drifts on the breeze as I step out of the car in front of the main house. The driver returns to the car as I scan the yard beyond the house. Marcel is already waiting near the corral, one hand resting on the saddle of a grey mare, the other shielding his eyes as he watches me approach.
He doesn’t smile right away, but his gaze lingers. Steady as I walk his way. "You made it," he says.
"Did you think I wouldn't?"
He shrugs, but a grin tugs at the corner of his mouth. “Let’s just say I didn’t know if you would back out."
I don’t respond to his doubt; instead, I give him a small smile as I stop in front of him. The mare beside him stamps a hoof and tosses her mane. I reach out instinctively to soothe her. "She’s beautiful."
