Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“For the ritual?” She tilts her head against my shoulder. “Always.”
We made it simple: every anniversary, we take one letter from the box. Whatever comes up is what we get. We read it aloud. We write a new one. The past becomes a chapter we survived.
I open the case. Paper rustles, dry and weighty with a kind of gravity I’ll always respect. I don’t look; I just take the one my fingers land on. The envelope is creased at the corners, sealed with a clumsy line of glue from a night my hands were shaking harder than I’d admit. I slide a thumb under and split it. The paper inside is dated in my teenage printing: January 15.
Savannah leans into me. I read.
Savannah,
I heard your laugh in the hallway at school today. It wrecked me in a way that made me want to be better. I keep trying to figure out how to be the kind of man your father was. I don’t have any of the answers. I only know that every time the wind moves the smoke away and then brings it back I think—if I could learn to breathe like the river, slow and sure, maybe I could carry light the way you do. I’m supposed to be strong and I’m sixteen and I’m not. But if you’re reading this someday, it means I kept trying, and I didn’t stop, and I still love you in a way that scares the hell out of me but also makes me stand up straighter when I hear your name. Please keep your porch light on.
—Axel
The page shakes by the end. It’s not fear. It’s relief, the kind that lands heavy. Savannah stares at the words like she’s watching a younger version of both of us cross a frozen yard and meet in the middle. She presses her lips together, then blows out a long breath and tips her head to look at me, eyes bright and wrecking.
“You were a poet,” she says softly, teasing and tender at once.
“I was a kid trying not to drown.”
“You learned to breathe.” She lays her palm on my chest. “You taught me how, too.”
We stand there while the fire throws shadows over our living room—the shelves we built for her books, the map of places we’ve been and will go, the ladder hewn from riverwood we sanded on the porch in early fall. I put the letter back in the box with the others. The past doesn’t vanish. It settles. It hums like something finished but still singing.
“Your turn,” she says, moving to the table where we set out paper and pens beside a bottle of something good. She sits, pulls her feet onto the rung of my chair like she always does, and watches while I write. The words come easily.
Savannah, I write, today we hung the thing that used to own me and it didn’t take the room when we did. It gave it back. You laugh when I call you mine, but it makes me stand up the way it did when I was sixteen—just with better form and fewer terrible decisions. I love the way you talk to the river like it answers, the way you tuck books into every corner of this house, the way you ignore my safety lectures until you don’t. When I carry you to bed tonight, it will be because I can, because I choose you, because I get this life, and because I still hear your name and stand up straighter. Leave the light on anyway. It looks good sparkling on the snow and in your eyes. From inferno to forever.
—A.
I peel the page free and hand it to her. She reads. I try not to shift like a rookie. She sets it down and slides into my lap in one smooth move that makes my blood change temperature. Her lips brush my jaw, then find my mouth, slow and grateful. The kiss lengthens until the room becomes fire and breath and her fingers in my hair.
“Your letter,” I manage when we surface, pretending my voice isn’t wrecked.
“Mm.” She eases off my lap—merciless—and crosses to the mantel. She reaches behind the box we just mounted, retrieves a small cream envelope, and returns with an expression I don’t have a category for—mischief braided with nerves, heat wrapped in light. She holds it out.
“For you,” she says, and I feel the shift before I open it. The kind that changes a room and a life with the slightest sound.
The flap gives. Inside: a glossy, black-and-white printout that looks like a storm cloud caught between branches. It takes me half a second to find the shape. It takes me no time to feel the floor tilt.
A small curve. A darker smudge.
My chest goes tight.
I sit back hard, then forward, then I stand like my body can’t decide how to hold me. The edges of the world sharpen—the smell of pine, the pop of a knot in the fire, the faint ticking of the baseboard heater at the far side of the room. I look up at her. She looks back, biting her lip, eyes bright and scared and happy in a way that breaks open everything I thought was already open.