The Letters She Never Sent

Chapter Four: Things She Didn't Say Out Loud

Liora had a meeting with a client at nine.

Virtual, thankfully. She had not left the apartment since Sienna's visit two days ago and she was not entirely sure she was ready to reenter the world yet, which was a feeling she recognized and did not particularly like recognizing. She had worked very hard to become someone who functioned. Who showed up. Who did not spend whole days inside her own head circling the same thoughts like water going nowhere.

She made herself presentable from the shoulders up, which was the only part the camera would see anyway, and sat at her desk with her notes open and her coffee close and her expression arranged into something professional and calm.

The client was a man named Gerald who was writing a memoir about his late wife. He was seventy-one years old, a retired civil engineer from Tucson, and he had the particular kind of grief that had settled into something quiet and permanent, the kind that had moved past the sharp stage and into something he carried the way you carry a stone in your pocket. Present always. Heavy in a way you stopped noticing until you reached in for something else and found it there.

He talked for forty minutes. Liora listened and took notes and asked the right questions in the right places, and when the call ended she sat back in her chair and looked at her notes and felt the familiar ache that came with this particular kind of work.

Gerald had loved his wife for forty-three years.

Forty-three years and he was still looking for the right words for it.

She understood that more than she ever let herself say out loud.

She closed her notes and opened Patricia's manuscript and stared at the chapter she hadn't been able to write yesterday. The big fight scene. All the unsaid things finally surfacing. She put her fingers on the keyboard and sat there for a full minute without pressing a single key.

Then she closed the laptop.

Not now. She would come back to it when she wasn't so aware of the irony.

She went for a walk at eleven, which was unusual for her on a workday but felt necessary in the way that sometimes only moving through the world can address. Portland was doing its October thing, cool and damp and smelling of wet leaves and coffee from the shop on the corner that always had its door propped open regardless of the weather. She pulled her jacket tighter and walked without any particular destination, which was something she rarely allowed herself because she preferred to move with purpose, but today she needed to just be a body in space for a while.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

She checked it without slowing her pace. A text from Damien.

Thinking about you. Hope the writing is going well. Call me tonight if you want to talk.

She read it twice. Damien Cross was a good man. She had known that about him from the beginning, from their first date fourteen months ago when he had shown up exactly on time with a specific book recommendation based on something she'd mentioned in passing on a dating app, because he had actually listened and actually remembered. He was thoughtful in that quiet, consistent way that didn't announce itself. He was steady.

She had told herself, when things had started getting serious, that steady was exactly what she needed. That steady was underrated. That the alternative to steady was a man who could make her feel more alive than she'd ever felt in her life and then disappear without a word on the day she had believed, completely and without reservation, was the beginning of everything.

She texted Damien back. Writing is slow today. Will call tonight. Hope your meeting went okay.

She put the phone back in her pocket and kept walking.

She was halfway down a block she didn't usually take when she stopped.

There was a flower shop on the corner. Small, independent, the kind with buckets of flowers arranged outside the door even in the cold. Mostly seasonal things, burnt orange dahlias and deep red roses and something small and white she couldn't name. She stood on the sidewalk and looked at them and did not move for longer than was probably normal for a person just passing by.

Real flowers.

She turned around and walked back the way she had come.

Sienna was already at the apartment when Liora got back, which was possible because Liora had given her a spare key three years ago after a minor plumbing emergency and Sienna had never quite given it back and Liora had never quite asked for it.

She was sitting on the kitchen counter drinking tea she had made from Liora's own supply, legs dangling, looking entirely at home, which she basically was.

"You went for a walk," Sienna said. It was not a question.

"I needed air."

"You also look like the air didn't help much."

Liora hung up her jacket and filled a glass of water at the sink. "He called again."

Sienna went still. "Elias?"

"His assistant. Same man as yesterday. Different number this time." She drank half the glass. "I didn't answer."

"Good."

"He left a voicemail."

Sienna's expression shifted slightly. "Did you listen to it?"

Liora set the glass down. "Three times."

Sienna put her tea down on the counter very deliberately. "What did it say?"

"That Elias understands I don't want to be contacted. That he respects that." She paused. "That he's read the letters and he's not calling to make excuses or ask for anything. He just wants me to know that he's sorry. That Elias is sorry." She stopped again. "And that if I change my mind, even just to tell him to his face to leave me alone, he would consider that enough."

The kitchen was very quiet.

"That's a well-crafted voicemail," Sienna said carefully.

"I know."

"Doesn't mean it's sincere."

"I know that too."

"Li." Sienna slid off the counter and stood up straight, the way she did when she was moving from friend mode into something closer to honest mode. "What are you thinking right now? Not what you're supposed to think. What are you actually thinking?"

Liora leaned against the counter opposite her and crossed her arms, not defensively, more like she needed something to hold herself together with.

"I'm thinking about the box," she said quietly. "Someone took it from under my bed, Sienna. Someone who knew where I lived, who knew what was there, and who knew his address in New York. And then someone left me a key and a note telling me he needs to know." She shook her head slowly. "I'm thinking that whoever did this knew both of us. And that scares me more than the letters getting to him."

Sienna was quiet for a moment. "You think it's someone you know."

"I think it has to be."

"Someone who had access to your apartment."

"Or who knows someone who does." She exhaled. "I keep going through it and I can't land on anyone. It doesn't make sense."

Sienna picked up her tea again and wrapped both hands around the mug and thought. That was one of the things Liora valued most about her, she actually thought before she spoke instead of filling silence just to fill it.

"Okay," Sienna said finally. "Two separate things. First thing: the letters are with him now and that cannot be undone. Whatever he does with that, whatever he felt reading them, that is outside your control and it is not your responsibility to manage his reaction." She held Liora's gaze. "Second thing: someone in your life did this without your permission and that is a problem that is entirely separate from Elias Voss, and you are allowed to be angry about it."

Liora nodded slowly.

"Are you angry?" Sienna asked.

"Yes," Liora said. "I'm also something else and I don't want to name it."

Sienna looked at her for a long moment and did not push. That restraint was its own kind of love and Liora felt it the way you feel something warm on a cold day, all at once and without warning.

"Damien doesn't know any of this is happening," Liora said.

"Are you going to tell him?"

She thought about the text she'd sent twenty minutes ago. The easy, surface-level exchange. Damien was steady and kind and he deserved honesty and she was aware, in the way you are aware of a thing you have been avoiding looking at, that she had not told him very much about her history with Elias. The broad strokes. Nothing more.

"I'll call him tonight," she said.

What she meant was that she would call him and tell him she'd had a strange week and the writing had been slow and ask about his meeting, and she would not say any of the rest of it because she did not know how to begin.

Sienna seemed to understand that too, because she just nodded and picked up her tea and didn't say anything else about it.

They stood together in the kitchen for a while, not talking, just occupying the same space the way old friends could, and outside the window Portland went on doing its gray and patient thing, indifferent and steady, the way the world always was when something inside it was quietly starting to shift.