The Letter
A Love Story Written in Ink That Never Dried
CHAPTER ONE: THE ENVELOPE
The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning in March, tucked between a utility bill and a furniture catalog in the mundane daily mail delivery that Emma Parker collected from her mailbox without expectation or excitement, and she almost discarded it as junk because the envelope was yellowed and worn with a postmark so faded it was barely legible, but something about the handwriting on the front stopped her, familiar loops and crosses that she had not seen in over a decade but that her fingers recognized before her conscious mind caught up, and when the recognition finally arrived it hit her like a physical blow because the handwriting belonged to James Calloway, the man she had loved with the desperate consuming intensity that only exists in your twenties, the man who had disappeared from her life without explanation on a rainy September evening ten years ago when he was supposed to meet her at the restaurant where they had their first date and where she had been certain he was going to propose, and instead of James arriving with a ring, he simply never arrived at all, and his phone went to voicemail and his apartment was emptied and his friends claimed ignorance and he vanished so completely from her world that she sometimes wondered whether she had invented him, whether the two years of loving him had been an elaborate hallucination that her mind constructed to fill some void she could not otherwise address.
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