Every Reason to Stay

Chapter 15: Letters

Chapter Content:

The first letter arrived eleven days after he left, a real one, paper and ink, which felt almost absurdly old-fashioned in a world of instant messages, until Amara held it in her hands and understood exactly why he'd chosen to send it that way.

Dear Amara,

I know we talked about calling. I still want to call, every day if you'll let me. But there's something I needed to say that felt too big for a screen, so forgive the handwriting, I haven't written anything longer than a grocery list since high school.

Edinburgh is grey. Not sad-grey, just honestly, consistently grey, like the sky forgot there were other colors. My flat has a radiator that clanks exactly like the one in my old apartment, which undid me a little the first night, lying there listening to it and thinking of you on my bed with your laptop, half-reading, half-listening to the water run. I didn't know a sound could ache.

Orientation was strange. Everyone here is brilliant in the specific, slightly exhausting way of people who've spent their whole lives being told they're exceptional. I kept waiting to feel like I belonged, and mostly I just felt far away. Not from the program. From you.

I wanted to tell you something I didn't say at the airport, because I was too busy running and too scared to slow down enough to say it properly. I'm not choosing Edinburgh over you. I never was. I'm choosing to finally be someone who doesn't need someone else to hand me a reason to want things. My father said something like that to me, the night before I came back to you, and I've been turning it over ever since. I think I finally understand it.

Write back whenever you're ready. No pressure. I just wanted you to have something real, something with my actual handwriting on it, so you'd know this isn't me disappearing into a different life. I'm just living it from somewhere colder.

Yours, still learning what that means,

Daniel

She read it four times before she let herself cry, sitting on the floor of her dorm room with her back against the bed, the radiator in her own building clanking out its familiar rhythm, and when she finally stopped, she got out a notebook, because she didn't own proper stationery, and started writing back.

They settled, without ever discussing it outright, into a rhythm: a letter every week or two, long and unhurried, the kind of writing neither of them had time for in a text message, alongside shorter calls that fit awkwardly around a five-hour time difference and both their schedules, calls that sometimes dissolved into comfortable silence because there was nothing urgent to fill it with, just the fact of each other's breathing on the line.

Amara kept his letters in a shoebox under her bed, which felt like something out of an old movie, except that it wasn't performance, it was just the only place that felt safe enough. She reread them on bad days. There were, that fall, a number of bad days.

Dear Daniel,

Campus feels smaller than it used to, which doesn't make sense, since you're the one who left. I think it's because I keep seeing all our old paths and taking different ones on purpose, around the quad instead of through it, past the library instead of the bench outside it. I'm not avoiding the memory exactly. I'm just not ready to walk through it yet.

The hearing happened. I don't know how much detail you want, so I'll just say: it's over, and it was sadder than I expected, and I cried in the dining hall afterward, which has never happened to me before in my entire life. Zoe says that's probably healthy. I don't love that she's right about things so often.

I started looking at the Lisbon application again. Just looking. I haven't let myself do anything more than that yet. It's strange, wanting something out loud again after a year of pretending I didn't want anything at all.

I think about the kitchen counter in your old apartment sometimes, randomly, in the middle of a lecture. The way you'd lean against it with your coffee and ask about my day like it was the most interesting thing that had happened to you all week. I miss being asked that question by someone who actually wanted the long answer.

Write when you can. I'll be here, taking the long way around the quad.

Amara

By November, the letters had grown easier, less careful, more like the two of them actually talking instead of two people performing honesty at each other across an ocean. Daniel told her about a professor who quoted Keats in the middle of econometrics lectures and seemed to think no one noticed. He told her about a pub near his flat that served a pie the size of a hubcap and a bartender who'd started calling him "the American" with real affection. He told her, in a letter near the end of the month, that he'd started running again, early mornings along the water, something he hadn't done since high school, because the stillness of it gave him somewhere to put all the thinking he used to do out loud, with her, across a kitchen table.

Amara told him about reapplying to Lisbon properly, finally, portfolio and all, including an essay she'd rewritten six times, the last version beginning: I have learned more about journalism from the things I almost didn't get to report on than from the things I did. She told him about her mother, who had started, slowly, asking more questions about her life instead of just worrying over it, a small thaw neither of them commented on directly. She told him about Renee, who she'd started getting coffee with sometimes, an unlikely friendship built entirely out of shared wreckage, the two of them comparing notes on how long it took, exactly, to stop flinching at a certain kind of charming smile.

She did not tell him, not yet, how often she still reached for her phone to text him something small and funny before remembering the five-hour gap, how often she caught herself setting two coffee cups out of habit before catching the mistake. Some things felt too fragile to put into a letter. Some things she wasn't ready to admit even to herself.

In December, his letter came shorter than usual, and something in the brevity made her hands go cold before she'd read a single word.

Amara,

I have to tell you something and I don't know how to make it sound less significant than it is, so I'm just going to say it plainly. I've been approached about a research fellowship here, a two-year extension past the original program, full funding, the kind of opportunity that doesn't come twice. I haven't said yes. I haven't said no. I wanted you to know it exists before I made any decision at all, because I promised you no more secrets, even small ones, even ones I'm still deciding how I feel about myself.

I don't know what two years means for us. I don't know what one year has meant for us yet, honestly, we're only three months in and I already feel like a different person than the one who got on that plane. I just know I'm not going to decide anything without telling you first. That part, at least, I've learned.

Tell me what you're thinking. I'll wait as long as you need.

D.

Amara sat with the letter for a long time before she picked up her pen, and when she finally wrote back, it surprised her how little fear was in the words, how much had changed since a rainy night in his doorway when the word go had felt like the only brave thing she knew how to say.

Daniel,

Don't decide anything for my sake. Don't decide anything against it, either. Just decide for the truest reason you can find, the way your father told you to, and tell me honestly, and we'll figure out the rest the way we've figured out everything since the airport: slowly, and together, from wherever we actually are, instead of where we wish we were.

I'm not scared of two years, Daniel. I spent a long time being scared of one week. I think I've used up my whole supply of that particular fear.

Whatever you decide, I'll still be here, taking the long way around the quad, getting a little braver every month.

Amara