Chapter 12: Forty-One Letters

Rafe's POV

My phone rang at 8:19 that night, and the screen said Jo.

I was on the dock with a coil of line I'd already coiled twice.

I answered on the first ring and said her name.

She didn't answer.

I heard a room with a clock in it, and a man's slippers on a wood floor.

Then I heard Frank Brennan say, very quiet, "Put it down and give me your phone."

I stood up.

I put my phone on speaker and held my laptop's voice recorder next to it, and I pressed the red button.

"Not yet, Dad," Jo said.

Her voice was clear and unhurried, and it carried.

She was talking to the room, and to the open phone in her lap, and she knew exactly who was on the other end.

"Forty-one letters," she said. "Did you count them while Mom burned them?"

The clock ticked.

"Joanna," Frank said.

"He wrote to me for two years. You burned all of it, in the fire pit, and Dawn put the ashes in the compost."

"What letters?" That was a different voice, farther away, Carol's.

"Carol, hang it up."

"He wrote forty-one letters, Mom. You wrote the text. 'Don't write again.' You sent it from my phone at five in the morning."

Nobody said anything for a long second.

Then Frank, tired and flat, said, "That boy would have taken you to Alaska."

"He asked me to marry him."

"He was going to drag you to the end of the earth."

"I was going to go."

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