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“As long as you’ll write me back”
“I’ll write to you every day,” she replied. I knew she would. She wrote to me already, and we saw each other almost every day. She told me it was practice. It was her way of talking to me even when she couldn’t. Her last letter was short and sweet, simply three words.
I love you.
I had written her back four.
I love you more.
Lettie looked down at our hands. Mine were so much bigger than hers, almost double in size. “And then when you’re done, you’ll come home and I’ll be done with school and we can move in together and drink coffee in the morning and eat donuts before work.”
“You hate coffee,” I replied, throwing a wrench in her plans.
“Yeah, but by then, I’ll be grown up and I will have acquired a taste for it.” She smiled and we continued to entangle our fingers together. “That’s how coffee works. Besides, I’ll need it for late-night study sessions and for writing down everything that’s happened so you feel like you’re there. By the time we move in together, I’ll need coffee to survive.”
“Okay, fair enough. I like your plan,” I said.
“Yeah, I like it too.” She paused. “And Tuck?”
“Yeah?”
“We’ll have a dog, right?” She looked so cute with her hair freshly brushed and hanging over her shoulders. Her freckles were darker than when I’d first met her, having been tanned by the sun, and I knew I would have given her anything she asked me for as long as she would always be mine.
I nodded. “Of course. We’ll have a dog named Gilbert.”
She smiled and leaned over to kiss me. “And we’ll rescue him. And then one day we’ll have another dog and we’ll name her Anne, right?”
“Anything for you,” I said, and I meant it.
“You promise?” she said, looking up at me through her eyelashes.
“I promise.”
When she was finally satisfied with my answer, she crawled on top of me, legs wrapped around, and kissed me again.
And I felt a pain in my heart at how much I would miss her while I was gone.
FORTY-SIX
LETTIE
I criedmyself to sleep almost every night at the thought of Tuck leaving. We only had a month left. I was suffocating in my own home, and my only escape, my only breath was in Aveline. When Tuck left, so would the air in my lungs. I wrote that in my latest letter to him to try to explain just how much I was going to miss him. I knew he would tease me relentlessly for my dramatic flair, but he would know that, even though it might sound ridiculous, it felt true.
My parents had planned another luncheon with Theo to prepare for the debutante ball that was happening the following month, and my skin was crawling thinking about it. The dances, the dinner, theeverythingwithout Tuck. It all seemed dreadful. Especially since my time with Tuck was limited. He was leaving that Sunday, the day after the ball, and I wanted to spend every last second with him before I would have to figure out what my life looked like without him.
And it didn’t look good from what I could see.
But there was no getting out of the ball, and thus, I would suck it up so I could get it over with.
Theo had arrived at exactly twelve in the afternoon, and I’d stepped down the stairs to greet him. We ate lunch with little conversation and then he asked me for a walk out on the property. My mother shooed us off as though she were preparing for an engagement announcement, and I reluctantly followed Theo—my mind in Aveline and not at all in this prison of a house with a boy I didn’t want to be with.
“How are things going with your boyfriend?” Theo asked, his step falling into line with mine.
“Fine,” I replied, not really wanting to divulge anything more to him. “And how are your shows going?”
“My shows? Oh. Yeah, really good. It’s been nice not having my parents question incessantly where I’m going.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Same. Thank you so much for doing this for me.”
