Marcus didn't answer but she was right and he knew she was right. And the knowing settled into him and stayed there quiet and uncomfortable in the way that true things sometimes are. They were heading back when she said almost casually. I've been thinking about the letter. Marcus kept walking at the same pace.
Didn't make a thing of it. Yeah, he said. I keep trying to figure out what I'm actually afraid of. A pause. And I think I think what scares me most isn't that it's going to hurt.
I know it's going to hurt. I'm okay with hurt. She paused again. What scares me is that he's going to say something that changes my understanding of what we were. What if there's something in there that makes the good parts feel I don't know less real?
Marcus thought about that. Do you believe he loved you? He asked. She looked at him sideways. Yes, she said without hesitation.
Then whatever's in the letter, Marcus said, came from that. Whatever he wrote, it came from a man who loved you. She was quiet for the rest of the block. When they got back to the houses, she stopped at the edge of her driveway and turned to look at him. Will you?
She stopped. This is going to sound strange. Say it anyway. Will you be there when I open it? Marcus didn't hesitate.
Not even for a second. Yeah, he said. I'll be there. She nodded like she'd been hoping for that and was trying not to show how much. Not tonight, she said, but soon.
Okay, he said. Soon, she went inside. Marcus walked the short distance back to his own house and stood in his kitchen and looked around at the ordinary unchanged surfaces of his life. The coffee maker, the dish rack, the calendar on the wall with the service appointments marked in red. And he felt acutely the strangeness of how a person can be standing in the same room they've stood in a thousand times and feel somehow that something in the coordinates of their life has shifted.
He called Darius to check in. His son was fine. His son was having pizza and playing video games. And could he stay an extra hour? Yes, he could stay an extra hour.
Marcus hung up and sat at the kitchen table in the quiet and thought about a woman who had carried an unopened letter for 3 and 1/2 years because she loved her husband too much to risk changing what she remembered. He understood that. God help him. He understood that down to the bone because he had a box, too. Not a letter, a box.