I Secretly Read Every Love Letter He Wrote Me, Then He Stopped Writing Them novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: The Last Letter
Clara lies to Miles in front of the whole mailroom, opens his last note a month later, and learns he leaves for Lisbon in sixteen days.
On the afternoon of the Senior Ball, Miles Ferris held a white envelope out to Clara Mercer in front of the whole Union mailroom.
The line for the mailboxes ran back to the door.
Somebody stopped talking.
Clara had one hand on her mailbox key and a stack of flyers in the other.
Her name was on the envelope in his square handwriting, the same as the thirty-five before it.
For three years, Miles had put a letter in her mailbox on the first Monday of every month.
For three years, everyone had watched her walk past it.
Today he was holding the last one out by hand.
She knew it was the last one, because he had told a friend he would stop after the Ball.
Clara's hand rose a few inches and stopped.
Then it dropped back to her side.
Miles waited. The afternoon light came through the high windows and lit up his hair.
Then one corner of his mouth went tight. It was not quite a smile.
"Clara," he said. "Do you really hate me that much?"
She bit the inside of her cheek until she tasted blood.
"Yes," she said.
Her voice shook, so she said it again, harder. "Yes."
Miles nodded slowly.
"Good," he said. "That's good to know."
He bent, pushed the envelope through the slot of her mailbox, and walked out through the line.
Nobody said a word until the door swung shut.
Then Beth Garner, who had been waiting two boxes down, took Clara by the elbow.
"Good for you," Beth whispered. "You're finally rid of him. I'm proud of you."
Clara nodded and kept her face still.
Everyone in the room believed she was relieved.
Nobody saw her hands. She held her key so hard that it left a red line across her palm.
She did not take the letter out that day. She took it out at midnight, when the mailroom was empty.
She did not open it.
A month later, she was still carrying it.
On the second Tuesday of May, Clara sat alone in Seminar Room 204 with the door closed and the envelope flat on the desk in front of her.
Outside, the quad was loud with seniors in caps and gowns taking practice photos.
She turned the envelope over.
The flap was sealed. It was the only one in three years that she had not touched.
She had opened all thirty-five of the others.
She did it late at night in the third carrel of the library stacks, where nobody looked for her.
She read each one slowly, with her thumb under the flap so it would not tear.
Then she pressed the paper back into its envelope and sealed it again with a thin strip of tape on the left corner, so it looked untouched.
Then she put it in the shoebox under her bed.
Miles's letters were about nothing and everything.
A pigeon that had learned to ride the campus shuttle. The wrong answer he gave in class and could not stop thinking about. A line from a poem he thought she would like.
In sophomore year he wrote that he was sorry for quoting her paper in front of everyone.
He had only wanted people to know how good it was.
That first month, she had written an answer on notebook paper.
It was still folded in the inner pocket of her backpack. She had added a line to it after every letter.
She had never once had the courage to put it in his hand.
Clara slid her thumbnail under the last flap.
Inside was a single sheet, folded in thirds.
Clara,
I know you hate me. That's okay. I don't like you anymore.
That was all.
No pigeon. No poem. No name at the bottom.
A hot sting rose behind her eyes.
She read it three times, and it said the same thing each time.
Then she thought about the hallway, and the light in his hair, and her own hand stopping in the air.
She had said yes because Frank's friend had been waiting for her in the parking lot that week.
She had said yes because she did not want Miles near anything her father touched.
Miles did not know any of that.
Clara pressed the heel of her hand against her eyes until the sting passed.
Then she reached into her backpack and took out the folded notebook page.
It was soft at the creases now.
She smoothed it flat on the desk. Three years of her handwriting crowded the margins.
She stood up.
"So I'm going to give it to him," she said to the empty room.
It was not brave, and she knew it.
But she was twenty-two, graduation was in sixteen days, and she had never once told him the truth.
She walked across the quad to the senior dorms and climbed to the third floor, where his door was propped open with a doorstop shaped like a cat.
His roommate was packing a box of mugs.
"Is Miles here?" Clara asked.
The roommate looked up, and then looked at her a second longer.
"He's at the registrar. Wait, are you Clara?"
"Yes."
"Oh." He put down a mug. "He didn't tell you? He's flying to Lisbon the day after graduation. A year-long fellowship. He's not coming back."
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend