Page 11 of These Tears

Excitement sparks inside me and I hold it between light fingers as if it might burn me.

I walk to my kitchen table with suppressed urgency, my thumb moving over the edge without thought. By the time I reach the chair, curiosity is bleeding out of my every pore, and I have to force myself to let go of the letter.

Several long moments pass as I stare at it resting on the table. Because it might contain rejection as well as something worse. But since hope should be dosed in small amounts after all, I finally reach for the flap.

Opening it carefully, I find a matt-finished photo inside. Of the fox – slightly warped at the corners the way photographs get when they’re handled too often.

My stomach plummets.

He returned it.

But when I flip it over, the breath stutters right back into me.

Beneath my quote, in ink several shades darker, another sentence rolls out in impossibly neat cursive – too disciplined for the violence my imagination keeps trying to assign to his hands.

‘Where is this from?’

A few words should not be enough to loosen the knot in my sternum. Somehow, they are.

A smile pulls at my mouth.

After all this time, he actually wrote back.

Maybe he kept the others, after all. Maybe he recognised the earlier quotes and didn’t need to ask. Or maybe this one simply caught his attention in a different way.

Either way, he answered.

And now? I can’t stop wondering: why this line?

Does he think I compared him to a monster?

With lungs full of static, I tear through my drawers for a pen and paper, pages flying in every direction.

Back on the chair, pen poised, heart in my throat, the rhythm of my finger-tapping against the barrel infuses me.

Control the panic. Make a plan.

‘The fish is circling the bait,’ I whisper to the photo, eyes locked on his handwriting. Then, because my mind always has to make things uglier than they are, I think: now how do I keep him talking?

I scribble the address first, drawing out every letter to postpone writing the note itself.

His name sits at the top like a curse and a challenge.

Drifting to the bookshelf, my gaze settles on the battered old Frankenstein volume wedged between two art books, its spine cracked and softened with years.

I start scribbling:

‘You can read it yourself.

‘I’ll bring you the title,

‘If you lend me your face.

‘The book will come with me – if you let me see you through my lens.’

It might backfire, I realise.

It might make him feel cornered, like I’m trying to condition him into playing.