He Hid Me Twelve Years and Paraded Her, So I Quit Both novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Fourth Letter
Jonah's POV
I had stood on Bea Fenner's sidewalk for ten minutes before I rang the bell.
I had rehearsed four speeches, and when the door opened every one of them left my head.
Nell stood on the stairs in her socks, with her hair coming out of its knot.
She looked at the water running off my jacket and at the plastic bag in my hand.
"What's that?" she said.
"The fourth letter."
"From 2022."
"I wrote it on a Sunday in March." I held it out. "I kept it in a drawer for four years because I couldn't decide what a man who had already been ignored three times had any right to say."
She came down the last steps and took it out of the bag.
Bea had gone into the kitchen and turned the cooking show up very loud.
Nell read standing in the hall.
The first line said: Dear Ms. Garrity, three letters is the most a sane man sends, and I am writing a fourth anyway.
She read the rest slowly.
It was a short letter, and she read it twice, and I stood on the mat and dripped.
"It's a good letter," she said at last.
"It's four years late."
"It's four years late," she agreed. "It's also the first thing you've ever brought to my door."
"I'll bring the rest, if you want it. I can bring a lot of things."
"I don't want a lot of things." She folded the page along its old creases. "I want you to stop looking at me like I'm going to hand you a sentence."
"Am I?"
"I don't know yet."
She turned and walked into the living room, and I understood that I had been told to follow.
We sat on Bea's plastic-covered couch with a foot of cushion between us and listened to the rain.
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