The Love Letter I Should've Thrown Away novel · Chapter 3 of 24

Chapter 3: The Hand

At the library's third window the teaching assistant admits he wrote the letter and that Brady took the credit, but he refuses to say so at her hearing.

The library closed at midnight, and I was still locked out of the night desk, so I waited on the steps until the day student turned the sign.

Then I went in through the side door, because the head of Pell Library had never taken back my key to it.

The third window is at the far end of the reading room.

Its brass lamp has never stayed on for more than a minute.

Someone was sitting in the chair under it, in the dark.

He had a gray wool coat folded on the table and a pencil in his hand, and he stood up when he saw me.

I knew the coat and the long shape of him from the hallway: the teaching assistant from Room 212.

"You came," he said.

"You were in the hallway last night."

"I was."

"You left that under my door."

"Yes."

"Why?"

He looked at the wallet in my hand.

"Because I think you brought it," he said. "May I see it? I won't take it. I'll stand here."

I took out the letter and held it up at arm's length, open.

He didn't reach for it.

I lit my phone, and he read the first line without touching it.

"I wrote that," he said.

I hadn't felt steady since the stairwell.

"You wrote it."

"The spring you were a freshman. I put it in your mailbox on a Friday morning, and I signed it."

"It isn't signed."

"It was."

He said it flatly, without any defense, and I noticed that the side of his right hand was stained with ink.

"My name is Micah Ketterman," he said. "You've seen me. I lived with Brady that year. I was the one who didn't talk."

I remembered a tall boy with a hood up, eating cereal at the end of a couch while Brady held court.

I remembered nothing about his voice.

"Margin notes," I said. "In the lighthouse book. That was you."

"The reserve copy. We went back and forth all year. You wrote that the keeper was an idiot for lighting the lamp for ships that wouldn't thank him."

"And you wrote that somebody had to."

"I did."

My eyes were burning.

"Then why was Brady the one who stood up at the mixer?"

"I don't know."

"You don't know."

"I wasn't there. I was packing for Edinburgh. I had a year abroad and a flight on Sunday." He swallowed. "Someone sent me the video later. He was on a table, holding your letter over his head, and everyone was cheering, and you were crying."

"I was happy."

"I could see that."

He said it quietly.

"I assumed he'd found it in my desk. I never asked him. Asking meant saying it was mine."

The lamp on the table flickered on, and the whole corner went yellow.

I saw his whole face for the first time, tired and unshaven and younger than I expected, with wire glasses and a dent on his nose where they sat.

Then the lamp clicked off again.

He reached over without looking and tapped it, and it came back.

"It does that," I said.

"I know. I've replaced the bulb twice."

I almost laughed, and I hated that I almost did.

"You watched me for two years," I said. "You came back in August, and you saw me with him in the Union, and you said nothing."

"You looked happy."

"That's your reason?"

"It was the only one I had that didn't cost you anything."

"It cost me everything. I kissed him, Micah. I kissed him for two years because I thought he was the one who wrote that."

His face changed.

"I know," he said. "I'm sorry."

"I don't want sorry. I have a hearing on Friday. If I can't prove he didn't write it, I lose my scholarship and my mom finds out from a stranger. You can prove it. You can stand in a room and say it's yours."

He didn't answer for a long moment.

The lamp buzzed.

"I can't," he said.

"What do you mean, can't?"

"My fellowship pays my tuition, and it's funded by the Sutliff family. If I put my name on that letter in front of a panel with his father sitting on it, I'm done here." He held my eyes. "That isn't the whole reason. The rest I can't tell you tonight."

"Then why am I standing in the dark with you?"

"Because I wouldn't let him do it again. He's already printed a girl's name over yours."

"That doesn't help me on Friday."

"No."

"Then what do I get?"

He lifted the pencil and set it down.

"You get to know it was real," he said. "Someone read every word you wrote in the margins and wanted to be brave. That's all I can give you."

I folded the letter and put it back in my wallet.

I had come looking for the man who wrote it, and he was in front of me, and it was worth nothing at all.

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