At that, Abe brought the letter up to his face and touched the paper against his cheek. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. I gripped the side of my chair, as my chest felt tight.
“Is she . . . ? Has she . . . ?” He opened his eyes and looked over at Mike. Mike didn’t say a word, just nodded. Abe lowered his head and grabbed the arm of his chair, gripping on to it so tightly that I could see the sinews in his arm tensing, like violin strings.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him, trying to hold back my tears. “But she loved you,” I blurted out, and then started rambling. “She loved you so much. She loved you more than she loved anyone in her entire life. With her every breath, every thought. She memorized every single one of your letters and would recite them to herself every day. She loved you so much, right until the day she died. She wrote you letters for the rest of her life, even though she knew you would never get them, and she hid them in her horse’s stable—”
“Darcy,” he whispered, softly.
“Yes,” I confirmed.
“She loved that stupid bloody horse,” he said, with a small smile. “It was the dumbest mare I’d ever met!” He let out a small laugh.
I caught Mike’s eye and we shared a tiny smile.
Abe stopped laughing and looked very serious again. “When did Edith pass?” he asked.
“The twenty-fifth of June, last year,” Mike said.
Abe nodded. “I felt her go,” he said softly, quietly, almost to himself.
I felt a breeze at the back of my neck and I turned around and looked behind me. The window was closed.
We sat in silence for a while as Abe ran his fingers over the handwriting on the envelope, over and over again.
“I think I’ll have that tea, after all.” He stood up and slowly walked out of the room.
“Do you think he’s okay?” I whispered to Mike.
Mike shook his head. “I don’t know. Would you be okay?”
“No,” I replied. “Should we be worried about him?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
We sat and waited for what felt like hours as the kettle boiled. Finally, he came back in holding a cup of tea in one hand and a small box in the other. He passed me the small box and sat down with his tea.
I looked at the box in my hands and slowly took the lid off. When I saw what was inside, the tears started streaming down my face. I reached in and pulled the pile of letters out. He’d kept all her letters, too, and they looked just as worn as hers did, as if they’d also endured a lifetime of reading and rereading. Something at the bottom of the box caught my eye. It was a photo. I pulled it out and found myself looking into Edith’s face—her laughing, happy, joyful face.
“It’s the only photo we have of ourselves together,” he said softly. “My cousin took it for us, and he had to get it printed in secret, so no one would ever see it.”
I clutched the photo between my fingers and bit my lip hard, to stop my tears turning into sobs.
“Oh, don’t cry, young lady. There is nothing to cry about. What you’re looking at, there, is the happiest day of my life,” he said.
I held the picture out for Mike. He took it and I could feel his emotions from where I was sitting.
“That was taken in the summer of 1948. God, I remember that summer as if it were yesterday. I can still smell the sea air and hear the screech of the cicada beetles in my ears. They make everything so loud and alive. It was one of those sticky, humid summers, when all the ladies complained that their hair was always ruined.” He smiled. “Edith used to hate what the humidity did to her hair, the way it curled up like it did. I thought she looked like a doll, though. Those big curls and green eyes, and she used to get these freckles, like a spray of stars across her nose . . .” He chuckled softly to himself. “She hated them. But, to me, she was the loveliest girl I’d ever seen in my life, and I just knew, from the moment I laid eyes on her, that I was going to love her. There was nothing not to love about her. But . . . the country didn’t want us to love each other, that’s the truth.” He got quiet and thoughtful for a while. “I . . . I haven’t spoken about any of this for a very, very long time.”
“When did you last speak to Edith?” I heard myself asking.
He smiled at me—a strange, faraway smile. “Just last night. I speak to her every night, and, sometimes, if I’m lucky, she visits me in my dreams. But that hasn’t happened in a while.”
I smiled back at him and our eyes locked for a while; that spark that she had painted all those years ago was still there, but it was dimmer.
“Last time I saw and spoke to her was on the seventh of September, 1949. We were at the cove together. We used to go there sometimes, because no one else did. There was an old town legend about the cove being haunted by the ghost of a pirate, or something. Everyone was too afraid to go there, except us.” He smiled again and looked thoughtful. “Edith used to say we were fools to go there! ‘Fools in love,’ she used to say. That was a quote from her favorite book.”
“Pride and Prejudice,” I added.
He nodded. “ ‘Fools in love forever,’ she would say . . .How wrong she was. Her father caught us there together. I’ll never forget the look on his face when he saw us. There was so much hatred in his eyes, and disgust. As if he had seen the most disgusting thing and he was going to be sick.” He shook his head and closed his eyes for a moment, as if trying to remember everything. “He screamed at us. Told us he would have me arrested for this. ‘You’re going to rot in jail, boy,’ he said. And then he started dragging Edith away. I tried to stop him, but Edith begged me not to. She begged me. She told me to run.” Abe stopped talking, but kept his eyes shut, as if he was at that moment in time.
